QOTD: Thank-you, Boeing

Quote of the Day:

For providing such a clear illustration of the forces driving the theory of the firm.

Oliver Williamson shared the 2009 Nobel mainly because of his work on a question that may seem obvious, but is much less so once you think about it: why are there so many big companies? Why not just rely on markets to coordinate activity among individuals or small firms? Why, in effect, do we have a lot of fairly large command-and-control economies embedded in our market system?

Williamson answered this in terms of the difficulties of writing complete contracts; when the tasks that need to be done are complex, so that you can’t fully specify what people should do in advance, there can be a lot of slippage and strategic behavior if you rely on market incentives; in such cases it can be better to do these things in-house, so that you can simply tell people to do something a particular way or to change their behavior.

In Boeing’s case, they outsourced far too much, only to find that they were getting parts that didn’t do what they were supposed to — and also to find that the subcontractors were seizing a lot of the rents. They discovered, in effect, that there are times when it’s better to rely on central planning than to leave things up to the market.

Obviously this isn’t always true. There’s a tradeoff. But that’s the point — and it’s this tradeoff that determines how big firms should be. Boeing has now provided a clear motivating example. Their loss, the economics profession’s gain. - Paul Krugman