strategic alliances venture capital and exit decisions in early stage high tech firms abstract we study the trade offs that biotech start ups face in the private equity market when they choose between raising firm level capital from venture capitalists or project level capital from strategic alliance partners increased alliance activity makes future alliances more likely but future vc activity less likely in contrast venture capital vc activity makes both future alliance and future vc activity more likely both types of private capital raise the hazard of going public acquisition as an alternative to initial public offering is made more likely by increased vc activity but the link between acquisition probabilities and alliance activity is less clear cut these results highlight both the importance of alliance partners in resolving asymmetric information problems in the capital acquisition process and the potential conflict of interest between different sources of private equity

the control of technology alliances an empirical analysis of the biotechnology industry we examine the determinants of control rights in biotechnology alliances through three case studies and a quantitative analysis aghion and tirole 1994 argue that control rights will be assigned so as to maximize the value of the final output as long as the r d firm has sufficient financial resources consistent with this framework the allocation of control rights to the r d firm increases with the firm s financial resources the empirical evidence regarding the relationship between control rights and the stage of the project at the time the alliance is signed is more ambiguous

what do entrepreneurs pay for venture capital affiliation this study empirically evaluates the certification and value added roles of reputable venture capitalists vcs using a novel sample of entrepreneurial start ups with multiple financing offers i analyze financing offers made by competing vcs at the first professional round of start up funding holding characteristics of the start up fixed offers made by vcs with a high reputation are three times more likely to be accepted and high reputation vcs acquire start up equity at a 10 14 discount the evidence suggests that vcs extra financial value may be more distinctive than their functionally equivalent financial capital these extra financial services can have financial consequences a central issue for early stage high tech entrepreneurs is obtaining external resources when the assets of their start up are intangible and knowledge based particularly for entrepreneurs without an established reputation convincing external resource providers such as venture capitalists vcs to provide financial capital may be challenging the literature contains two main lines of research for overcoming this problem one research stream has concentrated on designing institutional structures to permit financing early stage ventures this contractual and monitoring based approach is aimed at solving potential agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs e g admati and pfleiderer 1994 lerner 1995 hellmann 1998 and kaplan and str omberg 2001 2002 2003 a second research stream has suggested that when the quality of a start up cannot be directly observed external actors rely on the quality of the start up s affiliates as a signal of the start up s own quality

the economics of franchise contracts as an organizational arrangement the franchise contract lies between anonymous price mediated exchange and centralized intrafirm employment in contrast to conventional market exchange franchise contracts typically impose on franchisees retail quality standards common hours of business price controls and nonlinear payment schedules for example fixed initial royalty fees plus a percentage of gross retail revenues while franchisors typically provide national advertising and training programs monitor and inspect the franchisees performance with varying intensity across industries and hold the residual power to terminate the franchise agreement observations of actual terminations indicate that franchisors sometimes exclude this power franchisors sometimes face persistent queues of potential franchisees in contrast to simple employment contracts franchise agreements provide for sharing of profits through royalties on revenue or output and considerable freedom for independent decisions by local franchisees 1 why do these franchise contracts exist

a status based model of market competition this article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market it develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each

interorganizational alliances and the performance of firms a study of growth and innovation rates in a high technology industry this paper investigates the relationship between intercorporate technology alliances and firm performance it argues that alliances are access relationships and therefore that the advantages which a focal firm derives from a portfolio of strategic coalitions depend upon the resource profiles of its alliance partners in particular large firms and those that possess leading edge technological resources are posited to be the most valuable associates the paper also argues that alliances are both pathways for the exchange of resources and signals that convey social status and recognition particularly when one of the firms in an alliance is a young or small organization or more generally an organization of equivocal quality alliances can act as endorsements they build public confidence in the value of an organization s products and services and thereby facilitate the firm s efforts to attract customers and other corporate partners the findings from models of sales growth and innovation rates in a large sample of semiconductor producers confirm that organizations with large and innovative alliance partners perform better than otherwise comparable firms that lack such partners consistent with the status transfer arguments the findings also demonstrate that young and small firms benefit more from large and innovative strategic alliance partners than do old and large organizations copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

agency theory and franchising some empirical results this article provides an empirical assessment of various agency theoretic explanations for franchising including risk sharing one sided moral hazard and two sided moral hazard the empirical models use proxies for factors such as risk moral hazard and franchisors need for capital to explain both franchisors decisions about the terms of their contracts royalty rates and up front franchise fees and the extent to which they use franchising in this article i exploit several new sources of data on franchising to construct a cross section of 548 franchisors involved in various business activities in the united states in 1986 the data are most consistent with a model based on two sided moral hazard the empirical models are also more successful at explaining the extent to which franchisors choose to franchise stores than at explaining the terms of franchise contracts finally contrary to the predictions of several theoretical models i find that royalty rates and franchise fees are not negatively related

demand uncertainty and sales a study of fashion and markdown pricing the theory of clearance sales is expanded and applied to explain why markups markdowns and the frequency of sales of merchandise sold by department stores have increased dramatically in recent years and why they differ across merchandise groups tha major theme of the paper is that the growing role of fashion and product variety is an important reason for these increases and for the differences between merchandise groups the growing importance of fashion is illustrated by documenting the declining use of whites and the increasing use of colors and prints estimates of the effects of imports and technological and demographic changes on markups and markdowns are presented copyright 1988 by american economic association

specialization productivity and financing constraints we analyze optimal financial contracts when the specificity of investments is endogenous specialization decreases the liquidation value of assets but improves the asset s long term productivity while the former is known to make financing more difficult we show that the latter can ease financing constraints and increase financing capacity by improving an entrepreneur s incentive to repay the overall impact of specialization on the terms of financing depends on which effect is more important specialization decisions interact with the nature of investments their timing the need for outside financing and an entrepreneur s ability to commit to a level of specialization the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

improving channel coordination through franchising in this paper we explore the role of franchising arrangements in improving coordination between channel members in particular we focus on two elements of the franchising contract namely the royalty structure and the monitoring technology we begin with a simple analysis where a manufacturer distributes its product through a retailer and the retail demand is affected by the retail price and the service provided by the retailer in this context we show that neither royalty payments nor monitoring are needed for full coordination we then extend the model to allow for free riding by franchisees and show that although monitoring helps affect the behavior of the franchisees royalty payments are still unnecessary to coordinate the activities of the franchisor and the franchisees finally we show that in environments where factors affecting retail sales are controlled by both the franchisor and the franchisee royalty payments provide the necessary incentives for the franchisor while monitoring systems are used to ensure that franchisees also behave in the best interest of the channel our general results are found to be consistent with those in brickley and dark 1987 and norton 1988 who conclude that franchising is affected by principal agent problems our theory finds special support in the work of lafontaine 1988 where it is concluded that the incidence of franchising is related to cost of monitoring and the importance of franchisor investments

social capital structural holes and the formation of an industry network the formation of a network is determined by the opposition of two forces the first is the reproduction of network structure as a general social resource for network members the second is the alteration of network structure by entrepreneurs for their own benefit the idea of reproduction is a conventional one in organizational sociology but has taken on increased importance due to the work of bourdieu and coleman in contrast burt stresses the entrepreneurship of individual agents in exploiting structural holes that lie between constrained positions though complementary the theories of social capital and structural holes have fundamentally different implications for network formation this paper investigates these theories by examining empirically the formation of the interorganizational network among biotechnology firms we propose that network structure determines the frequency with which a new biotechnology firm or startup establishes new relationships network structure indicates both where soci

strategic communication networks in this paper we consider situations in which individuals want to choose an action close to others actions as well as close to a payoff relevant state of nature with the ideal proximity to the common state varying across the agents before this coordination game with heterogeneous preferences is played a cheap talk communication stage is offered to players who decide to whom they reveal the private information they hold about the state the strategic information transmission taking place in the communication stage is characterized by a strategic communication network we provide a direct link between players preferences and the strategic communication network emerging at equilibrium depending on the strength of the coordination motive and the prior information structure equilibrium strategic communication networks are characterized in a very tractable way and compared in term of efficiency in general a maximal strategic communication network may not exist and communication networks cannot be ordered in the sense of pareto however expected social welfare always increases when the communication network expands strategic information transmission can be improved when group or public communication is allowed and or when information is certifiable

rational inattention and organizational focus this paper studies optimal communication flows in organizations a production process can be coordinated ex ante by letting agents stick to a prespecified plan of action alternatively agents may adapt to task specific shocks in which case tasks must be coordinated ex post using communication when attention is scarce an optimal organization coordinates only a few tasks ex post those tasks are higher performing more adaptive to the environment and influential hence scarce attention requires setting priorities not just local optimization our results provide microfoundations for a central idea in the management literature that firms should focus on a limited set of core competencies

language and the theory of the firm we characterize efficient technical languages and study their interaction with the scope and structure of organizations efficient languages use precise words for frequent events and vague words for unusual ones a broader organizational scope allows for more synergies to be captured but reduces within unit efficiency since it requires a more generic language a manager working as specialized translator may also be used to achieve between unit coordination while maintaining separate languages our theory reconciles two recent well documented phenomena within organizations the recent increase in information centralization and the reduction in hierarchical centralization

on the future of international joint venture research international joint ventures ijvs are an important type of international strategic alliance isa and have been studied by scholars for decades resulting in a plethora of empirical studies publications and reviews yet an inadequate accumulation of knowledge exists as a closer look reveals much more than providing a summary and critical assessment of past contributions this paper develops an expansive research agenda based upon a deep understanding of past research and comprehensive frameworks that distill this research we identify a number of research opportunities that would not only advance ijv research but also closely related literatures and disciplines such as isas theories of the multinational firm international business research and strategic management

network location and learning the influence of network resources and firm capabilities on alliance formation this paper presents a dynamic firm level study of the role of network resources in determining alliance formation such resources inhere not so much within the firm but reside in the interfirm networks in which firms are placed data from extensive fieldwork show that by influencing the extent to which firms have access to information about potential partners such resources are an important catalyst for new alliances especially because alliances entail considerable hazards this study also assesses the importance of firms capabilities with alliance formation and material resources as determinants of their alliance decisions i test this dynamic framework and its hypotheses about the role of time varying network resources and firm capabilities with comprehensive longitudinal multi industry data on the formation of strategic alliances by a panel of firms between 1970 and 1989 the results confirm field observations that accumulated network resources arising from firm participation in the network of accumulated prior alliances are influential in firms decisions to enter into new alliances this study highlights the importance of network resources that firms derive from their embeddedness in networks for explaining their strategic behavior copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

the economics of career concerns part ii application to missions and accountability of government agencies the paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies officials incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions a lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy the paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives last the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on government bureaucracies 1999 the review of economic studies limited

double sided moral hazard and the nature of share contracts contractual arrangements involving revenue profit sharing are often based on fairly simple often linear rules in addition in many contexts these contracts are not finely adjusted to the particular circumstances of individual agents or markets nor do they vary over time to the extent current theories based on optimal contracting suggest they should we develop a simple model of such revenue or profit sharing arrangements based on double sided moral hazard and show that this model can account for many of these stylized facts more specifically the model shows that linear contracts can be optimal and that benefits from customizing terms can in some cases be quite limited if not zero

when does corporate venture capital investment create firm value abstract over the past decade billions of dollars have been invested by established companies in entrepreneurial ventures what is often referred to as corporate venture capital yet there is little systematic evidence that corporate venture capital investment creates value to investing firms scholars have suggested that established firms face underlying challenges when investing corporate venture capital namely structural deficiencies inherent in corporate venture capital may inhibit financial gains however firm value may still be created as a result of other benefits from investing primarily providing a window onto novel technology in this paper we propose that corporate venture capital investment will create greater firm value when firms explicitly pursue corporate venture capital to harness novel technology using a panel of cvc investments we present evidence consistent with our proposition the findings are robust to various specifications and remain unchanged even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in investing firms our results have important implications for corporate venture capital in particular and technology strategy in general

learning to contract evidence from the personal computer industry organizational forms involving more detailed contracts than are found in traditional spot market exchanges appear to be increasingly prevalent there has been relatively little analysis however of the extent to which firms learn how to use contracts to manage their interfirm relationships over time in this paper we conduct a detailed case study of a time series of 11 contracts concluded during 1989 1997 between the same two partners both of whom participate in the personal computer industry to explore whether and how firms learn to contract we find many changes to the structure of the contracts that cannot be fully explained by changes in the assets at risk in the relationship and evidence that these changes are largely the result of processes in which the firms were learning how to work together including learning how to contract with each other the nature of this learning appears to have been quite incremental and local that is not very far sighted we suggest how and when contracts might serve as repositories for knowledge about how to govern collaborations and suggest some boundary conditions for this phenomenon our findings also provide implications for the debate about whether contracts have a positive or negative effect on interorganizational trust we conclude with suggestions for future research

ownership and control rights in internet portal alliances 1995 1999 we examine the structure of more than 100 alliances by internet portals and other firms between 1995 to 1999 from a contract theory perspective models of incomplete contracts frequently invoke unforeseen contingencies the cost of writing contracts and the cost of enforcing contracts in justifying the assumption of incompleteness the setting in which internet portals formed alliances was rife with these sorts of transaction costs we argue that these alliances can be viewed as incomplete contracts and find that the division of ownership and the allocation of control rights are consistent with the incomplete contracting literature copyright 2003 by the rand corporation

which ties matter when the contingent effects of interorganizational partnerships on ipo success this paper investigates the contingent value of interorganizational relationships at the time of a young firm s initial public offering ipo we compare the signaling value to young firms of having ties with two types of interorganizational partnerships endorsement relationships such as those with venture capital firms and investment banks and strategic alliance partnerships we propose that under different equity market conditions potential investors in an issuing firm attend to different types of uncertainty attention to these different types of uncertainty affects investors perceptions of the relative value of a young firm s different kinds of endorsements and partnerships and hence ipo success results from a sample of young biotechnology firms show that ties to prominent venture capital firms are particularly beneficial to ipo success during cold markets while ties to prominent investment banks are particularly beneficial to ipo success during hot markets a firm s strategic alliances with major pharmaceutical health care firms did not have such contingent effects implications for understanding the contingent value of interorganizational ties are discussed copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

who i am and how i contract the effect of contractors roles on the evolution of contract structure in university industry research agreements in this exploratory study of university industry sponsored research agreements we investigate how organizational roles direct the relational learning of contracting personnel which subsequently influences contract evolution integrating theory with comments from field interviews we posit that as scientists gain contracting experience with an exchange partner their focus of attention on knowledge creation supports the establishment of a relationship based on technical competence behavioral experience and operational routines that cause the enforcement terms of subsequent contracts to become less detailed we also submit that contract administrators because of their focus on knowledge protection mitigating opportunism and enforcement primarily accumulate joint governance experience and establish administrative routines that cause the enforcement terms of subsequent contracts to become more detailed rich content analysis of monitoring and intellectual property terms of sponsored research agreements supports our theoretically grounded hypotheses

the duality of collaboration inducements and opportunities in the formation of interfirm linkages i argue that the linkage formation propensity of firms is explained by simultaneously examining both inducement and opportunity factors drawing upon resource based and social network theory literatures i identify three forms of accumulated capital technical commercial and social that can affect a firm s inducements and opportunities to form linkages firms possessing these capital stocks enjoy advantages in linkages formation however firms lacking these accumulated resources can still form linkages if they generate a radical technological breakthrough thus i identify paths to linkage formation for leading as well as peripheral firms i test these arguments with longitudinal data on technical collaborative linkages in the global chemicals industry copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

network prominence bargaining power and the allocation of value capturing rights in high tech alliance contracts we suggest and provide empirical evidence that the bargaining power of alliance partners stemming from their prominence in alliance networks influences the ex ante allocation of value capturing rights in high tech alliance contracts network prominence can enhance the availability of alternative partners for a firm and thereby elevates the firm s bargaining power and enables the firm to receive i more value capturing rights vis a vis its partner i e more net value capturing rights and ii more rights to the unexpected outcomes vis a vis its partner we empirically investigate the content of research and development r d collaboration contracts between biotech and pharmaceutical firms and show that as the prominence of the client i e pharmaceutical firm increases it is able to attain i more net value capturing rights to outcomes within the area of collaboration and ii more rights to unexpected outcomes by contrast increased prominence of the r d firm i e biotech firm decreases both t

internal organization and economic performance an empirical analysis of the profitability of principal firms business historians have long been aware that organizational innovations have had remarkable productivity ramifications a h cole has asserted that if changes in business procedures and practices were patentable the contributions of business change to the economic growth of the nation would be as widely recognized as the influence of mechanical inventions 9 pp 61 62 some economists have come to recognize the role of organizational innovation kenneth arrow noting that truly among man s innovations the use of organization to accomplish his ends is among both his greatest and earliest 2 p 2441 oliver williamson 271 has further championed the study of organizational innovation doing much to provide the theoretical underpinnings necessary to bring the topic into the corpus of economic theory furthermore richard caves has observed that both corporate strategy and organizational structure influence the economic performance of the firm and the market in which it sells 6 p 641 however structural parameters are absent from the neoclassical theory of production which masquerades as the economic theory of the firm developments in the theory of the firm are unlikely to accommodate organizational structure considerations until connections between structure and performance have been demonstrated empirically the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between a particular kind of decentralized and divisionalized internal hierarchical structure what oliver williamson has called the m form innovation 27 ch 81 and firm profitability in essence the methodology involves examining the differential performance between the m form innovator in an industry and its principal rival application of two non parametric statistical tests the sign test and the wilcoxon matched pairs signed ranks test is supportive of the hypothesis that the m form structure is associated with superior firm

ricardo s early treatment of profitability reply to hollander and prendergast i will deal first with professor hollander s objection to my reading of ricardo s letter to malthus of i i august i8i4 and with his startling claim to have readily accept ed the corn calculation in ricardo s correspondence of i8i4 i986 p iq99 the passage from the letter in question begins individuals do not estimate their profits by the material production but nations invariably do works vi p i2i in my article i984 p 737 i took this as a response to malthus s point that in no case of production is the produce exactly of the same nature as the capital advanced consequently we can never properly refer to a material rate of produce works vi p i i 7 the salient features of ricardo s reply are first that he does not mention let alone defend the assumption of capital product homogeneity which casts doubt on sraffa s interpretation works i p xxxi and secondly that he does defend the measurement of profits the net social surplus in material terms hollander complains that the passage from ricardo in fact says nothing about the profit rate or profit share i986 p 4 his emphasis this is true and instead of drawing the inference that any previous reference by ricardo to a material rate of produce was based on the representation of the profit share in physical terms i984 p 737 emphasis added i should have said simply profit or net surplus this does not make a fundamental difference to my interpretation hollander also underlines my observation that ricardo did not restrict the material estimation of profits to the agricultural sector but ricardo s argument that nations invariably estimate profit in material terms can be read as a justification for using the technique in a more unusual context specifically in the treatment of agriculture which was after all the sector to which malthus was apparently referring when he made his objection about the material rate of produce works vi pp i i 7 8 i therefore stand by my interpretation or tortuous meandering as professor hollander so colourfully describes it i986 p i093 which brings me to the readily accept ed corn calculation that hollander would put in its place until hollander i983 the textual basis for attributing the calculation was confined to ricardo s letter of 25 july i 8 i 4 works vi pp i i 4 5 leaving aside temporarily the validity of this evidence it is relevant to consider hollander s reaction s to his discovery in hollander i973 the calculation is described as a rather casual and

the ricardo debates hollander and garegnani on natural price and output determination samuel hollander and pierangelo garegnani have debated the appropriate interpretation of david ricardo since 1973 without substantive agreement on at least one issue the interdependence of prices and output levels the debate has stalled because textual exegesis cannot solve a logical problem this paper demonstrates that such interdependence exists unless one makes one of two restrictive and un ricardian assumptions either output levels must be insensitive to wage rate changes or all industries must be subject to constant costs

creating and capturing value in repeated exchange relationships the second paradox of embeddedness prior empirical studies suggest repeated exchange develops increasing value in buyer supplier relationships a first order implication of this finding is that buyers will concentrate exchange among a relatively small number of suppliers to generate maximum value in relationships however buyers are equally concerned with value capture by distributing rather than concentrating exchange buyers may position themselves to capture more of the value created leaving buyers potentially conflicted concerning the choice we label this dynamic the second paradox of embeddedness distinguishing it from uzzi s uzzi b 1997 social structure and competition in inter firmnetworks the paradox of embeddedness admin sci quart 42 1 35 67 paradox driven by technological uncertainty by examining the procurement activities of a large diversified manufacturing company we then test for supplier and buyer behavior consistent with the conditions that give rise to the second paradox and behaviors that result from it

venture capitalists and cooperative start up commercialization strategy this paper examines the possible impact of venture capital vc backing on the commercialization direction of technology based start ups by asking to what extent if at all do vc funded start ups engage in cooperative commercialization strategies strategic alliances or technology licensing or both relative to a comparable set of start ups and with what consequences to address these questions i assemble a novel data set that matches firms receiving a federal research and development subsidy through the u s small business innovative research program to vc funded firms by observable characteristics in five technology intensive industries these data allow decoupling of cooperative activity resulting from start up development via the passage of calendar time from that due to association with vcs an analysis of the 696 start ups in the sample split by an external funding source suggests substantial boosts in both cooperative activity associated with vc backed firms and in the likelihood of an initial public offering

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

formal contracts in the presence of relational enforcement mechanisms evidence from technology development projects formal contracting addresses the moral hazard problems inherent in interfirm deals via explicit terms designed to achieve incentive alignment alternatively when firms expect to interact repeatedly relational mechanisms may achieve similar results without the associated costs however as we now know from a growing body of theoretical and empirical work the resulting intuition that relational mechanisms will be substituted for formal ones whenever possible does not generally hold the extent to which firms substitute relational mechanisms for formal ones in the presence of repeated interaction is an empirical question that forms the basis of this paper we study a sample of 52 joint technology development contracts in the telecommunications and microelectronics industries and devise a coding scheme to allow empirical comparison of contract terms counter to the above intuition but consistent with recent research we find that a firm s contracts are more detailed and more likely to include penalties when it engages in frequent deals whether with the same or different partners our results suggest complementarity between formal and relational contracts and have implications for optimal contracting particularly in high technology sectors

networks as the pipes and prisms of the market1 this article draws an analytical distinction between two types of market uncertainty egocentric which refers to a focal actor s uncertainty regarding the best way to convert a set of inputs to an output desired by a potential exchange partner and altercentric which denotes the uncertainty confronted by a focal actor s exchange partners regarding the quality of the output that the focal actor brings to the market given this distinction the article considers how the value of structural holes and market status vary with these two types of uncertainty the article proposes that the value of structural holes increases with egocentric uncertainty but not with altercentric uncertainty in contrast the value of status increases with altercentric uncertainty but declines with egocentric uncertainty thus actors with networks rich in structural holes should sort into markets or market segments that are high in egocentric uncertainty high status actors should sort into markets that are low in egocentric

complementarity and evolution of contractual provisions an empirical study of it services contracts an increasing volume of business activity appears to be occurring via alliances or other interfirm arrangements in which complex contracts are featured yet there has been relatively little study of contract design in the strategy or management literatures the economics literature on contracting has been extensive but it has been less concerned with learning and evolution phenomena in which strategy and organization scholars are deeply interested in this paper we investigate the relationship between two types of contractual provisions that are important in high technology contracts or contracts for which environmental uncertainty or technological complexity are significant namely contingency planning and task description previous research suggests that contracts can vary significantly in the degree of detail with which such key provisions are written and that they are each subject to learning in this paper we find evidence from a sample of 386 contracts that contingency planning and task description behave as complements in contractual design we argue that this complementarity reflects patterns of learning to contract we also find that repeated exchange between two firms leads to greater effort at contingency planning in subsequent contracts a finding that is also consistent with learning effects but not with frequently made claims that contracts and trust are substitutes

the scope and organization of production firm dynamics over the learning curve i introduce a bayesian learning model of the firm to account for a variety of empirical facts about firms the many tasks the firm can undertake the scope of the firm are informationally related so that the firm can enjoy some economies of scope from information the model predicts changes in firm size and its comovement with firm scope that are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence it also provides an explanation for the limits to the scope of the firm the firm may lack information or it may be costly to communicate the information necessary to undertake many tasks