Technological Interdependencies,Specialization and Coordination A Property Rights Perspective on The Nature of the Firm

This paper develops a property rights perspective on the nature of the firm. The basic idea is that learning by doing in production and coordination stem from experience in production and that user rights over productive assets are necessary in order to accumulate the experience needed to perform improvements in production. Accumulation of skills from learning by doing in production is accelerated by specialization in production. However, specialization introduces greater complexity and new kinds of tools and equipment and this creates uncertainty about the best way of coordinating specialized interdependent activities. The result may be bottlenecks in production and uneven development of components. Experimenting in coordination is necessary in order to eliminate these problems. It is argued that the Coasian notion of firms where coordination is provided by the direction of managers provides a cheap way of conducting the experiments needed to collect information on how best to coordinate interdependent activities.Property rights, specialization in production, firm, boundaries, learning

A Transaction cost Perspective on the Influence of Standards on Product Development Examples from the Fruit and Vegetable Market

In this paper I argue that quality standards, products standards, and quality classes influence the priority that firms give to different product developments. These standards may be viewed as institutions in the sense of shared rules of behavior or codes. They have become shared because there are increasing returns to their use. These increasing returns apply both to their functions as means of reducing the costs of specifying and communicating product quality and to their functions as means of reducing buyers' costs of comparing the quality of different products - both of which are part of transaction costs. When reliable and extensively used standards exist, transaction costs are reduced. But these positive consequences to individual firms of adhering to the same standards create a sort of inertia in product development. This is because developments which are in line with existing standards will not introduce new transaction costs, while developments which break with the conformity of the standards will. In order for the latter kinds of product developments to be profitable, both development costs and transaction costs have to be overcome.Transaction costs, product development standards

Original and Derived Judgment An Entrepreneurial Theory of Economic Organization

Recent work links entrepreneurship to the economic theory of firm using the Knightian concept of entrepreneurship as judgment. When judgment is complementary to other assets, and these assets or their services are traded in well-functioning markets, it makes sense for entrepreneurs to hire labor and own assets. The entrepreneur’s role, then, is to arrange or organize the human and capital assets under his control. We extend this Knightian concept of the firm by developing a theory of delegation under Knightian uncertainty. What we call original judgment belongs exclusively to owners, but owners may delegate a wide range of decision rights to subordinates, who exercise derived judgment. We call these employees “proxy-entrepreneurs,” and ask how the firm’s organizational structure — its formal and informal systems of rewards and punishments, rules for settling disputes and renegotiating agreements, means of evaluating performance, and so on — can be designed to encourage forms of proxy-entrepreneurship that increase firm value while discouraging actions that destroy value. Building on key ideas from the entrepreneurship literature, Austrian economics, and the economic theory of the firm we develop a framework for analyzing the tradeoff between productive and destructive proxy-entrepreneurship. We link this analysis to the employment relation and ownership structure, providing new insights into these and related issues in the economic theory of the firm.Judgment, entrepreneur, delegation, employment relation, ownership

On exceedance times for some processes with dependent increments

Let ${Z_n}_{n\ge 0}$ be a random walk with a negative drift and i.i.d. increments with heavy-tailed distribution and let $M=\sup_{n\ge 0}Z_n$ be its supremum. Asmussen & Kl{\"u}ppelberg (1996) considered the behavior of the random walk given that $M>x$, for $x$ large, and obtained a limit theorem, as $x\to\infty$, for the distribution of the quadruple that includes the time \rtreg=\rtreg(x) to exceed level $x$, position Z_{\rtreg} at this time, position Z_{\rtreg-1} at the prior time, and the trajectory up to it (similar results were obtained for the Cram\'er-Lundberg insurance risk process). We obtain here several extensions of this result to various regenerative-type models and, in particular, to the case of a random walk with dependent increments. Particular attention is given to describing the limiting conditional behavior of $\tau$. The class of models include Markov-modulated models as particular cases. We also study fluid models, the Bj{\"o}rk-Grandell risk process, give examples where the order of $\tau$ is genuinely different from the random walk case, and discuss which growth rates are possible. Our proofs are purely probabilistic and are based on results and ideas from Asmussen, Schmidli & Schmidt (1999), Foss & Zachary (2002), and Foss, Konstantopoulos & Zachary (2007).Comment: 17 page

On the exact distributional asymptotics for the supremum of a random walk with increments in a class of light-tailed distributions

We study the distribution of the maximum $M$ of a random walk whose increments have a distribution with negative mean and belonging, for some $\gamma>0$, to a subclass of the class $\mathcal{S}_\gamma$--see, for example, Chover, Ney, and Wainger (1973). For this subclass we give a probabilistic derivation of the asymptotic tail distribution of $M$, and show that extreme values of $M$ are in general attained through some single large increment in the random walk near the beginning of its trajectory. We also give some results concerning the ``spatially local'' asymptotics of the distribution of $M$, the maximum of the stopped random walk for various stopping times, and various bounds.Comment: 10 pages, minor revision of discussion, correction of typos, and additional reference

Regular Variation in a Fixed-Point Problem for Single- and Multiclass Branching Processes and Queues

Tail asymptotics of the solution $R$ to a fixpoint problem of type $R =_{st} Q + \sum_1^N R_m$ is derived under heavy-tailed conditions allowing both dependence between $Q$ and $N$ and the tails to be of the same order of magnitude. Similar results are derived for a $K$-class version with applications to multitype branching processes and busy periods in multiclass queues.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Institutions as Knowledge Capital: Ludwig M. Lachmann’s Interpretative Institutionalism

The paper revisits the socioeconomic theory of the Austrian School economist Ludwig M. Lachmann. By showing that the common claim that Lachmann’s idiosyncratic (read: eclectic and multidisciplinary) approach to economics entails nihilism is unfounded, it reaches the following conclusions. (1) Lachmann held a sophisticated institutional position to economics that anticipated developments in contemporary new institutional economics. (2) Lachmann’s sociological and economic reading of institutions offers insights for the problem of coordination. (3) Lachmann extends contemporary new institutional theory without simultaneously denying the policy approach of comparative institutional analysis