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.
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Paper provided by DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies in its series DRUID Working Papers with number
98-10.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
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