We study how the internal organization of firms — specifically, the allocation of ownership of assets and the distribution of profit among the firm’s managers — is determined in a competitive market. We ask how scarcity of assets, skills or liquidity in the market translates into ownership...

We consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labor, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...

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 present sufficient conditions for monotone matching in environments where utility is not fully transferable between partners. These conditions involve complementarity in types not only of the total payoff to a match, as in the transferable utility case, but also in the degree of...

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 consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labor, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...

Mobility depends essentially on investment, which often occurs in environments in which individuals match (school) or will match after investing (the labor market). Where partners can transfer surplus to each other only imperfectly (NTU), the pattern of matching will typically be inefficient,...

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...