In-House Competition, Organizational Slack and the Business Cycle

This paper analyses the impact of variations of product demand on the amount of internal slack in multi-plant firms in a model in which facilities can produce output at a privately known cost up to a previously determined capacity level. It is shown that the amount of slack in the firm is pro-cyclical. Indeed, as capacity constraints become tighter in booms, slack increases in booms, because the power of in-house competition is reduced, while the opposite is true in downturns. Also, in downturns the firm may use high-cost facilities even when low-cost plants are not running at capacity