A Formal Theory of Firm Boundaries: A Trade-Off between Rent Seeking and Bargaining Costs

Yusuke Mori
Additional contact information
Yusuke Mori: Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo, JAPAN

No DP2013-20, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: We develop a theory of firm boundaries in the spirit of transaction cost analysis, in which trading parties engage in ex post value split. We show that ex post inefficient bargaining under non-integration creates a trade-off between rent seeking and bargaining costs: while non-integration incurs lower rent-seeking costs than integration, it suffers from bargaining delay and breakdown, which never occur under integration. This result explains why rent-seeking activities within firms are likely to be more costly than those between firms, and offers a formal justification for the "costs of bureaucracy" in Williamson (1985).

Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2013-20.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2013-20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University 2-1 Rokkodai, Nada, Kobe 657-8501 JAPAN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office of Promoting Research Collaboration, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University ().