Wednesday 6 October 2010

The ownership of the firm under a property rights approach

This is the title of an interesting looking new working paper by Leshui He. The abstract reads,
The boundaries of the firm and the ownership of the firm have been two of the main themes of the economics of organization over the past several decades. In this paper, I develop a general multi-party framework that integrates the ownership of the firm into the property-rights approach to the firm. I consider the ownership of the firm as the ownership of the rights to terminate cooperation with any party while maintaining a contractual or employment relation with all the other related parties of the firm. The model in this paper allows for the separation of the ownership of the firm from the ownership of the alienable assets that partly constitute it. Such a general multi-party setup may provide new tools for the study of the problem of the firm's boundaries as well as inspiration for further applications of the theory of property rights.
The referral to property rights here means the Grossman-Hart-Moore approach.

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