IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/ausm04/215.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Boundaries of the Firms as Information Barriers

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Chou

Abstract

Most existing theories of the firms define a firm as a collection of physical assets, and hence can not explain the firm from a human-asset perspective, which is of particular importance for understanding human-capital intensive firms. To fill in the gap, this paper proposes an alternative definition -- a firm is a group of people who work in a very close way so that outsiders cannot clearly distinguish one group member from another. By this definition, the boundaries of the firm matter because they can alter investment specificity and hence alleviate or aggravate the hold-up problem. Specifically, when there is substantial investment externalities integration is more efficient, and conversely separation is more efficient when investment externalities are small. This result is obtained under both Nash and alternating-offer bargaining. The effect of `relational contracts' (Baker, Gibbons and Murphy [2002]) is also examined to show that the newly defined organization structures matter even when relational contracts can be signed

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Chou, 2004. "The Boundaries of the Firms as Information Barriers," Econometric Society 2004 Australasian Meetings 215, Econometric Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:ausm04:215
    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 search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Boundaries of the firms; Information Barriers;

    JEL classification:

    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior

    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:ecm:ausm04:215. 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: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    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.