This paper shows that a firm prefers a process-based task assignment compared to a function based one if the tasks are from functional areas which are neither too complementary nor too substitutable. We consider several projects with contributions from several functional areas. The organization...

Blockchain (distributed ledger technology) is an institutional technology that allows trust to be manufactured instead of being earned. Trust is an important component of business and trade and has previously been subsumed into information costs. It is only now that the importance of trust is...

This essay on Corporations is a chapter in an upcoming volume on economic theology edited by Stefan Schwarzkopf.The secular study of corporations has long regularly focused on three sets of concerns: (1) Is the idea of corporate “personhood” only a convenient shorthand for a complex set of...

The corporate governance structure of monasteries is analyzed to derive new insights into solving agency problems of modern corporations. In the long history of monasteries, some abbots and monks lined their own pockets and monasteries were undisciplined. Monasteries developed special systems to...

We propose a theory of firm production that requires diverse inputs. We show that in a competitive labor market, firms differ in their skill composition. Organizations with higher Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are larger and hire from a broader range of skills. Technological progress leads to...

The agent-based approach views an organization as a collection of agents, interacting with one another in their pursuit of assigned tasks. The performance of an organization in this framework is determined by the formal and informal structures of interactions among agents, which define the lines...