[经济学]巴泽尔经济学著作.pdfVIP

September 10, 2001 Preliminary A Theory of Organizations i To Supersede the Theory of the Firm Yoram Barzel Introduction The theory of organizations that I formulate in this paper has three central themes: 1.The relationship between enforcement methods and organization. 2. The problems that the costliness of measuring inputs and outputs bring about and the usefulness of the measurement framework for organizing transaction costs models of organization. 3. The claim that the firm is not a useful concept and should be replaced with a set of organizations according to their ownership structure. The theory of organizations offered here opens the way for predicting which activities will fall under each organizational form. Agreements within and across organizations must be enforced, and enforcement issues suffuse agreement formation and execution. I focus on the difference between state enforcement and enforcement by long-term relations. State enforcement is at the interface of organizations, whereas enforcement by long-term relations characterizes, among others, within-organization interactions. Costly information, and its operational counterpart, costly measurement, is a basic ingredient in the analysis of institutions. Adopted here is a measurement costs framework that unifies and augments the analysis of the leading transaction costs models of the firm. I contend, however, that in spite of its popularity, the firm itself is not a useful concept, and that we shoul