Principals, Agents, and the Learning Curve: The Case of Steam-Electric Power Plant Design and Construction

Mark J McCabe

Journal of Industrial Economics, 1996, vol. 44, issue 4, 357-75

Abstract: A number of factors, including design variation and the combination of uncertain costs and cost-plus contracting, diminished opportunities and incentives to improve power plant design and construction over the last several decades. This paper incorporates these factors into a model of learning that relies on a principal-agent framework. The author finds that, because of design variation, learning was reduced when an agent contracted with a series of different principals; agent learning declined when cost uncertainty increased during the late 1970s and 1980s; and, at the same time, the locus of learning may have shifted from agents to principals. Copyright 1996 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-1821%2819961 ... 0.CO%3B2-K&origin=bc full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:bla:jindec:v:44:y:1996:i:4:p:357-75

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0022-1821

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Industrial Economics is currently edited by Pierre Regibeau, Yeon-Koo Che, Kenneth Corts, Thomas Hubbard, Patrick Legros and Frank Verboven

More articles in Journal of Industrial Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().