IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-18204-6_7.html

The Incentive Limits of Firms: A Comparative Institutional Assessment of Bureaucracy

In: Economic Incentives

Author

Listed:
  • Oliver E. Williamson

Abstract

Why can’t a large firm do everything that a collection of small firms can do and more? This is a variant of a question that has been asked many times before but for which an adequate answer has never been devised — to wit, what is responsible for limitations in firm size? Yet another way of putting this same issue is this: why not organize everything in one large firm?

Suggested Citation

  • Oliver E. Williamson, 1986. "The Incentive Limits of Firms: A Comparative Institutional Assessment of Bureaucracy," International Economic Association Series, in: Bela Balassa & Herbert Giersch (ed.), Economic Incentives, chapter 7, pages 204-237, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-18204-6_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-18204-6_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Henrik Egbert & Teodor Sedlarski & Aleksandar B. Todorov, 2024. "Foundations of Contemporary Economics: New Institutional Economics vs. New Economic Sociology – The Granovetter-Williamson Debate," Economic Thought journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 1, pages 37-53.
    3. Ufuk Akcigit & Nathan Goldschlag, 2023. "Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors," NBER Working Papers 31085, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Cambini Carlo & Filippini Massimo & Piacenza Massimiliano & Vannoni Davide, 2011. "Corporatization and Firm Performance: Evidence from Publicly-Provided Local Utilities," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 7(1), pages 191-213, July.
    5. Birger Wernerfelt, 1988. "Economic Organization of Trading Relationships: Hierarchies and Asset Ownership," Discussion Papers 824, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    6. Samuel, Sajay, 2018. "A conceptual framework for teaching management accounting," Journal of Accounting Education, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 25-34.
    7. Kumkar, Lars, 1998. "Privatwirtschaftliche Koordinierungsstrukturen in vertikal strukturierten Industrien: Eine Analyse der Stromwirtschaft auf Grundlage der neuen Institutionenökonomik," Kiel Working Papers 873, Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-18204-6_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.