Economic Theories of the Firm - 2

这是对现代产业组织经济理论中最具创造性、影响力和成果的学者之一基于成就的研究的更新。这个项目的主要重点将是研究制造企业、其供应商、技术和组织形式之间的共同进化之间的相互作用，以及在存在规模回报、互补性和“设计依赖”的情况下的协调和战略问题。第二个重点将是公司工作中的激励措施，以及如何根据这些问题设计薪酬合同、工作、权力关系和决策程序。第三个重点将是支持交易所的现代制度的演变，以及这些制度如何影响现代公司的演变。该项目的第一部分代表了一个重要的新研究方向，应该发展成为一个富有成果和令人兴奋的经济理论领域。在以前的NSF拨款下完成的关于单个公司的研究提供了一个以与客户的沟通程度为主要设计变量的离散组织设计的新理论。利润最大化的企业选择两种不同的、互补的组织结构：低库存、广泛型沟通组织或高库存、低沟通系统。低库存公司与高库存公司在相同环境下的不同之处在于，它们有更高的新产品推广率、更灵活的生产技术(例如机器人技术)、对分包商的更大依赖以及对工人的更全面培训。下一阶段的研究将是扩展这一理论，以研究制造系统和企业间其他活动的演变，并最终发展出关于管理角色的严谨经济学理论。

This is an accomplishment-based renewal of the research of one of the most creative, influential and productive scholars in the modern economic theory of industrial organizations. The primary emphasis in this project will be on studying the interactions between the co-evolution of manufacturing firms, their suppliers, technologies, and organization forms and on the problems of coordination and strategy in the presence of returns to scale, complementarities, and "design dependence." A second emphasis will be on the incentives at work in firms and how compensation contracts, jobs, authority relations and decision processes are designed in light of these problems. A third emphasis will be on the evolution of modern institutions for supporting exchanges and how these affected the evolution of the modern firm. The first part of the project represents a major new direction of research that should develop into a fruitful and exciting area of economic theory. Research completed under the previous NSF grant on individual firms provides a new theory of discrete organizational design with the extent of communications with customers as the major design variable. Profit maximizing firms are shown to choose one of two different and complementary organizational structures: a low inventory, extensive communication organization or a high inventory, low communication system. The low inventory firms differ from high inventory firms in the same environment in that they have higher rates of new product introduction, more flexible production technologies (e.g., robotics), greater reliance on subcontractors, and more general training for workers. The next phase of the research will be to expand this theory to study the evolution of manufacturing systems and other activities across firms and eventually to develop a rigorous economic theory of the role of management.