Interesante reflexión de Gary Becker sobre los distintos modelos de organización empresarial y el papel de la competencia, a propósito de las enseñanzas de Oliver Williamson. Vale la pena leerlo entero.
Both the inter country and within country evidence indicate that no single organizational form is always the most profitable even in a particular sector of the economy. Different combinations of scale economies, principle-agent problems, compensation practices, thickness of the span of control, and many other variables highlighted in the organizational literature often produce outcomes that are about equally efficient and profitable. The outcome of strong competition is the only really decisive way to determine which are the possibly quite different but about equally efficient combinations of all these different variables.
The major difficulty in evaluating many governmental organizations is that they often do not face such strong competition and they have no simple measure of success, such as profits. These two factors make it difficult to use Stigler's survival test. To take Posner's example, can the criminal catching activities of say the FBI be efficiently combined with a terrorist deterrent function? If this were a competitive industry with many different organizations and good observable measures of success, one could then look at whether such combinations compete successfully in the longer run against more specialized agencies. Lacking either much competition or such measures of success, one has to rely in good part on the insights of analyses of these issues. Similarly, the organization and efficiency of armies is only rarely tested against competition on the battlefield. When so tested, losing armies often try to reorganize so that they can look more like the successful armies, although generals are often accused of reorganizing to fight the last war.
Su compañero de blog Richard Posner también tiene buenos aportes en su anotación, muy recomendable.
