Publications

The Economic Nature of the Firm

Type
Link
Cost
Paid
Published
1986
Updated
2009
Full Name
The Economic Nature of the Firm: A Reader

The Economic Nature of the Firm brings together classic writings on the economic nature and organization of firms. It explores the firm's place in the market economy and addresses the transactions that are integrated under a firm's roof and what limits the growth of the firm. The Economic Nature of the Firm also examines employer-employee relations and the motivation of labor and studies the firm's organization from the standpoint of financing and the relationship between owners and managers. The volume also includes a consolidated bibliography of sources cited by the authors and an introductory essay by the editors that surveys the new institutional economics of the firm and issues raised in the anthology.

  • This is a book of classic and near-classic readings on issues in the theory of how firms are organized, written by economists well known in the field.

  • Part I explores the general theme of the firm's nature and place in the market economy.

  • Part II addresses the question of which transactions are integrated under a firm's roof and what limits the growth of firms.

  • Part III examines employer-employee relations and the motivation of labor.

  • Part IV studies the firm's organization from the standpoint of financing and the relationship between owners and managers.



Table of Contents

Editor's Preface

Reintroducing The Economic Nature of the Firm

Part I. Within and Among Firms: The Division of Labor

  1. From The Wealth of Nations

  2. From Capital

  3. From Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

  4. From The Modern Corporation and Private Property

  5. The use of knowledge in society

  6. Corporate governance

Part II. The Scope of The Firm

  1. The nature of the firm

  2. Vertical integration, appropriable rents, and the competitive contracting process

  3. The governance of contractual relations

  4. The limits of firms: incentive and bureaucratic features

  5. Bargaining costs, influence costs, and the organization of economic activity

  6. The boundaries of the firm revisited

Part III. The Employment Relation, the Human Factor, and Internal Organization

  1. Production, information costs, and economic organization

  2. Contested exchange: new microfoundations for the political economy of capitalism

  3. Understanding the employment relation: the analysis of idiosyncratic exchange

  4. Multitask principal-agent analyses: incentive contracts, asset ownership, and job design

  5. Work motivation

  6. Worker participation

Part IV. Finance and The Control of the Firm

  1. Mergers and the market for corporate control

  2. Agency problems and the theory of the firm

  3. Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs, and ownership structure

  4. Organizational forms and investment decisions

  5. The rise in managerial stock ownership

  6. Executive compensation as an agency problem

  7. An economist's perspectivecon the theory of the firm

  8. Ownership and the nature of the firm

References