En una entrada anterior hice una selección de comentarios del entorno de la GMU y la escuela austriaca sobre Elinor Ostrom, y enlacé con varios de sus trabajos y artículos relacionados. Ahora hago lo propio con Oliver Williamson.
Jeff, en Cheap Talk, explica la tesis básica de Williamson (construida sobre la de Coase) de que la empresa surge como una forma de organización eficiente en el mercado para soslayar costes de transacción y poder hacer buen uso de los activos o recursos específicos.
Instead of giant firms building and selling cars, why aren’t there a bunch of tiny firms each doing a tiny part with all of their interaction governed by the market or by contract? There are three main reasons why.
First, its costly to use the market. If the chassis firm is going to be buying axles from the axle firm all the time, it would save transaction costs by just integrating. Then it can “procure” axles with a memo.
Second, the contracts would be impossibly complicated and unwieldy. Imagine writing a complete blueprint for the car, breaking it down into individual instructions for every actor who is supposed to contribute, laying out the timing when each party is supposed to arrive and do his part, describing payments as a function of the performance of each interdependent action, etc. That is probably already impossible, but imagine you could do that. Now suppose that a supply shock requires you to use different materials for the chassis. This would require a coordinated change in many parts of the car, to keep structural integrity, balance, etc. The entire volume of contracts would have to be re-written.
The third reason is the one that adds richness to the theory of the firm. Most of the transactions that occur within firms require parties to make investments that only make sense within the context of that specific firm. The party making the investment has little or no option to recover the value of the investment outside the firm. When the chassis firm contracts with the firm building auto bodies, it writes down minute specifications that must be met. The bodies produced could not be sold to any other chassis maker. The firm building auto bodies must invest in the machinery that can make these specific bodies. Once sunk that investment has no value outside of the specific relationship with the chassis firm.
The reason this adds richness to the theory is that it explains which transactions must be encompassed within firms. Transactions that require relation-specific investments would be crippled if conducted across firm boundaries. Once the die is cast for building these specific auto bodies, the chassis firm has no reason to pay a price that compensates for the sunk cost because there is no outside option. This hold-up problem implies that the auto body firm has poor incentives to make the investment in the first place, unless it integrates with the chassis firm and becomes a claimaint to the profits of the integrated firm.
Alex Tabarrok también hace un comentario en la misma línea, enfatizando el tipo de preguntas que Williamson se plantea en su línea de estudio:
In Adam Smith there is the pin factory and the market and from that beginning we trace the long literature in economics focused on the twin questions, What price to set? How much to produce? Following Coase, Williamson asks different questions, Why a pin factory? Why are the 18 steps to make a pin performed by a single firm rather than two or more? Why are there many firms instead of one large firm? Why does the pin factory not vertically integrate upwards to buy the steel factory and downwards to buy the retail hardware shop?
Pero hay un artículo sobre Williamson que es de lectura imprescindible para los austriacos (y para los economistas neoclásicos fieles al modelo de competencia perfecta): Williamson and the Austrians, de Peter Klein.
Klein, uno de los economistas actuales más fructíferos en el ámbito de la teoría de la empresa, fue estudiante de doctorado de Williamson. Extracto varios fragmentos relevantes, pero vale la pena leerlo entero.
Sobre la relación entre el trabajo de Williamson y la Escuela Austriaca:
Williamson is no Austrian, but he is sympathetic to Austrian themes (particularly the Hayekian understanding of tacit knowledge and market competition). His concept of asset specificity enhances and extends the Austrian theory of capital and his theory of firm boundaries has almost single-handedly displaced the benchmark model of perfect competition from important parts of industrial organization and antitrust economics.
He is also a pragmatic, careful, and practical economist who is concerned, first and foremost, with real-world economic phenomena, choosing clarity and relevance over formal mathematical elegance. For these and many other reasons, his work deserves careful study by Austrians.
Sobre la distinción entre "el mercado" y "la empresa" que suelen utilizar teóricos como Coase o Williamson (o el mercado en sentido estrecho, y el mercado en sentido amplio).
Some Austrians have argued, following Alchian and Demsetz (1972), that Coase and Williamson wrongly claim that firms are not part of the market, that entrepreneurs substitute coercion for voluntary consent, and that corporate hierarchies are somehow inconsistent with the free market (e.g., Minkler, 1993; Langlois, 1995; Cowen and Parker, 1997; Matthews, 1998). I think this is a misreading of Coase and of Williamson. It is true that Coase speaks of firms "superseding" the market and entrepreneurs "suppressing" the price mechanism, while Williamson says firms emerge to overcome "market failure." But they do not mean that the firm is outside the market in some general sense, that the market system as a whole is inefficient relative to government planning, or anything of the sort.
Moreover, Williamson does not use the term market failure in the usual left-interventionist sense, but means simply that real-world markets are not "perfect" as in the perfectly competitive general-equilibrium model, which explains why firms exist. Indeed, Williamson's work on vertical integration can be read as a celebration of the market. Not only are firms part of the market, broadly conceived, but the variety of organizational forms we observe in markets — including large, vertically integrated enterprises — is a testament to the creativity of entrepreneurs in figuring out the best way to organize production.
Sobre la distinción entre los contratos "dentro de la empresa" y los contratos fuera de ella.
Coase and Simon emphasize fiat, by which they mean simply that employment contracts are, within limits, open-ended. The employer does not negotiate with the employee about performing task A, B, or C on a given day; he simply instructs him to do it. Of course, the employment contract itself is negotiated on the labor market, just as any contract is negotiated. But, once signed, it is qualitatively different from a contract that says "independent contractor X will perform task A on day 1." An employment relationship is characterized by the zone of authority (what Simon called the "area of acceptance"). Williamson emphasizes the legal distinction, namely that disputes between employers and employees are settled differently from disputes between firms, between firms and customers, between firms and independent suppliers or distributors, etc.
Grossman and Hart, and my own work with Nicolai Foss, emphasize the distinction between asset owners and non-owners. If I hire you to work with my machine, I hold residual control and income rights to the use of the machine that you do not have, and thus your ability to use the machine as you see fit is limited. If you own your own machine, and I hire you to produce services with that machine, then you (in this case, an independent contractor) hold these residual income and control rights, and this affects many aspects of our relationship.
Peter Klein y Nicolai Foss mantienen el blog Organizations and Markets que recomiendo a todos los interesados en teoría de la empresa y la gestión. El Nobel a Williamson ha sido el protagonista del blog estos últimos días.
De Klein sugiero dos artículos excelentes que beben tanto de Mises cy Rothbard omo de Coase y Williamson:
- Economic Calculation and the Limits of Organization, The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 2 (1996).
- Heterogeneous Capital, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Organization, (coescrito con Kirsten Foss, Nicolai Foss y Sandra K. Klein), Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, Diciembre 2001.
En este capítulo (The Make-or-Buy Decision: Lessons from Empirical Studies) del Handbook of New Institutional Economics Peter Klein desarrolla las aportaciones de Williamson.
Teppo en Orgtheory.net repasa cuál ha sido el impacto y la influencia de Oliver Williamson en el ámbito de la teoría de la organización, la gestión estratégica y la sociología de la organización.
Del propio Williamson podéis leer The Economics of Governance, de 2005, que resume sus principales argumentos. Aunque también recomendaría, ya puestos, leer el célebre artículo de Ronald Coase sobre la empresa: The Theory of the Firm (1937).
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