Issue 1

Volume 12 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Spring 2003

Power in the Firm and Managerial Career Concerns

Jaime Ortega
More powerful managers make more important decisions. Therefore, firm performance is more informative about the abilities of such managers, who, realizing that they are more visible, are more eager to improve performance. If this reputation effect exists, how should firms allocate power? I analyze the optimal allocation of power and derive implications for several issues that often arise in management practice: the choice of departmentation criteria, the importance given to seniority, and the width of job definitions. Finally, I show that the model is consistent with the empirical evidence on managerial succession.

Private Politics

David P. Baron
This paper introduces the subject of private politics, presents a research agenda, and provides an example involving activists and a firm. Private politics addresses situations of conflict and their resolution without reliance on the law or government. It encompasses the political competition over entitlements in the status quo, the direct competition for support from the public, bargaining over the resolution of the conflict, and the maintenance of the agreed-to private ordering. The term private means that the parties do not rely on public order, i.e., lawmaking or the courts. The term politics refers to individual and collective action in situations in which people attempt to further their interests by imposing their will on others. Four models of private politics are discussed: (1) informational competition between an activist and a firm for support from the public, (2) decisions by citizen consumers regarding a boycott, (3) bargaining to resolve the boycott, and (4) the choice of an equilibrium private ordering to govern the ongoing conflicting interests of the activist and the firm.

Does Ownership Matter? Evidence from the Zaibatsu Dissolution Program

Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer
In 1985, Demsetz and Lehn argued both that the optimal corporate ownership structure was firm-specific, and that market competition would drive firms toward that optimum. Because ownership was endogenous to expected performance, any regression of profitability on ownership patterns would yield insignificant results. To test this hypothesis, we use the zaibatsu dissolution program from late-1940s Japan as a natural experiment: an exogenous shock to the equilibrium ownership structure. Through that program, the US-run occupation removed the more prominent shareholders from many of the most successful Japanese companies. By focusing on the way firms and investors responded to the mandated selloff, we accomplish two goals: (a) we avoid the endogeneity problem that has plagued much of the other research on the subject, and (b) we clarify the equilibrating dynamics by which competitive markets move firms toward their optimal ownership structure.

Why aren’t all Truck Drivers Owner-Operators? Asset Ownership and the Employment Relation in Interstate for-hire Trucking

Jack A. Nickerson and Brian S. Silverman
Transaction-cost and agency theorists have frequently cited trucks as prototypical user-owned assets, and have consequently predicted a predominance of self-employed drivers who contract with motor carriers. In fact, owner-operators accounted for less than one-third of US trucking activity conducted by large interstate trucking firms in 1991, a proportion that has changed little since deregulation. Given the predictions of organizational economists, why is self-employment in the interstate trucking industry not the dominant organization form?

Sunk Costs, Contestability, and the Latent Contract Market

Christodoulos Stefanadis
The idea that an industry with sunk costs may be contestable even in the absence of long-term contracts has received little attention informal economic theory yet is sometimes popular among practitioners. This paper formally illustrates the argument. In an infinitely repeated game, there exists a class of contestable outcomes in which the monopolist sells only on the spot market and charges low prices along the equilibrium path to prevent customers from resorting to long-term contracts. The crucial test for contestability is the level of transaction costs in the latent contract market.

R&D Competition when firms Choose Variance

Luís M. B. Cabral
I consider an infinite-period race where players choose between low- and high-variance motion technologies. I provide sufficient conditions under which, in equilibrium, the leader chooses a safe technology and the laggard a risky one, thus formalizing the sports intuition that the laggard has nothing to lose. Various examples and empirical implications are presented.