We construct a price-theoretic model of integration decisions and show that these choices may adversely affect consumers, even in the absence of monopoly power in supply and product markets. Integration is costly to implement but is effective at coordinating production decisions. The price of...

We model technological progress as an external effect of organizational design, focusing on how factories, based on labor division, could spawn the Industrial Revolution. Dividing labor, as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by observers of production processes. However, entrepreneurs...

While most researchers in industrial organization agree that the neoclassical, cost-minimizing, unitary, view of the firm is restrictive, it is still the main object of anlysis in the literature. We review the literature in industrial organization and the place occupied by a richer view of the...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...

Little is known theoretically, and even less empirically, about the relationship between firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within firms. We develop a model in which firms choose which suppliers to integrate and whether to delegate decisions to integrated suppliers. We test...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country, perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...

We develop a tractable model of the allocation of control in firms in competitive markets, which permits us to study how changes in the scarcity of assets, skills or liquidity in the market translate into control inside the organization. Firms will be more integrated when the terms of trade are...

We develop a tractable model of the allocation of ownership and control within firms operating in competitive markets. The model permits analysis of how the scarcity of assets in the market translates into ownership structures inside the organization. It identifies a price-like mechanism whereby...