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Decentralzed Decision-Making and Self- Management in Firms: Potenitals for Transaction Costs and Trustless Revolutions

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Decentralzed Decision-Making and Self- Management in Firms: Potenitals for Transaction Costs and Trustless Revolutions DECENTRALZED DECISION-MAKING AND SELF- MANAGEMENT IN FIRMS: POTENITALS FOR TRANSACTION COSTS AND TRUSTLESS REVOLUTIONS YAËL WILLIAM OSSOWSKI THESIS Submitted as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, Economics at CEVRO Institute, 2018 Prague, Czech Republic Advisor: Dr. Boudewijn Bouckaert ABSTRACT Firms exist because exchange within a firm is cheaper than in the market. That is the contribution of transaction cost theory, and it explains why firms form internal organizations. Experiments in decentralized forms of organizational structure have evolved to empower individuals and remove the traditional role of managers. This has limited or even removed many incumbent transaction costs. Without managers, oversight and monitoring costs are scrapped, thereby leaving more resources for maximizing utility and profitability. Technological mechanisms such as blockchains provide a method by which firms can further eliminate transaction costs by replacing intermediaries and administrative departments with decentralized, distributed trustless networks. That being the case, how much does organizational structure contribute to transaction costs of a firm, and what methods can a firm implement to better mitigate transaction costs? Conducting interviews and examining case studies in self-management, such as The Morning Star Company, Valve Corporation, and Zappos, this paper explores how decentralized decision-making and boss- less structures lower transaction costs, and what advantages exists over firms with steep, centralized hierarchies. The introduction of trustless consensus technology provides potential for further decentralizing authority, replacing intermediaries, and minimizing transaction costs within and between firms, and is thus also included as a contribution to the theory of the firm. 1 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 3 ONE: FIRM ORGANIZATION, AND MARKET STRUCTURES 4 THEORIES OF THE FIRM 4 THE FIRM’S HIERARCHY 6 MARKET STRUCTURES 9 THE ROLE OF THE ENTREPRENEUR 11 TWO: DECENTRALIZED DECISION-MAKING AND MANAGEMENT 16 SELF-MANAGING ORGANIZATIONS 16 TECHNOLOGY AND FIRM HIERARCHIES 18 TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSACTION COSTS 20 LESS HIERARCHY, MORE COLLABORATION 23 THREE: CASE STUDIES 24 THE MORNING STAR COMPANY AND SELF-MANAGEMENT 24 MANAGING WITHOUT MANAGERS 30 ZAPPOS AND HOLOCRACY 32 CENTRALIZATION AT GENERAL MOTORS 36 FOUR: TRUSTLESS CONSENSUS AND BLOCKCHAIN 39 THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THE TECHNOLOGY 39 ITS APPLICATION IN FIRMS 41 FIVE: ANALYSIS: STRUCTURE OF THE FIRM 45 AREAS OF WORK TO BE DECENTRALIZED 45 TRANSACTION COSTS IN DECENTRALIZED FIRMS 48 CONCLUSION 51 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 53 REFERENCES 53 2 Introduction As most businesspeople, managers, and economists of all stripes can attest, a particular level of technological progress has led to innumerable advancements in how we regiment our lives, how we work, and how we organize ourselves to accomplish goals. This has expanded the scope of economic growth and brought forth vast general wealth to individuals in today’s industrial societies. Standards of living have increased steadily for the past few decades. This has been the case for North America, Europe, South America, and increasingly, the Asian and African continents (Easterlin 2000). Pivotal to this growth has been the efforts of entrepreneurs and business owners, individuals who recognized certain market opportunities and seized upon them. Their method for achieving this was through firms they established and managed to better wield and direct resources to accomplish certain goals. Early literature on the “Nature of the Firm,” as first proposed by Ronald Coase (Coase 1937), focused on the core reasons for why firms exist and their functions. Put simply, firms exist due to transaction costs. There exist markets for products and ideas, and “forming an organization and allowing some authority to direct resources,” as Coase wrote, saves costs overall. Many additions have been made to Coase’s original ideas as time has progressed, technology has improved, and new insights have been gained. Post-Coasen theorists have uniquely focused on transaction costs (what Coase called ‘marketing costs’), while others have dedicated efforts to explaining property rights and contract theory within the firm. And while scholarship on the theory of the firm in the domain of economics has advanced, there are still ideas and concepts to introduce that can also provide usefulness to the fields of organizational studies, strategic management, and entrepreneurial economics. 3 As firms have grown and evolved over time, we have been able to examine how various structures of internal organization deal with transaction costs at every level. More decentralized forms of structure provide us with an opportunity to examine how removing managers and localizing decision-making lower transaction costs and shape the firm. In this thesis, I propose to add to the theory of the firm for the 21st century by focusing on the why decentralizing key aspects of management and organizational structure lowers transaction costs. The adoption of distributed trustless consensus, known colloquially as blockchains, further decentralizes these structures by removing intermediaries and transaction costs associated with monitoring and verifying information. The methods used to explore these questions are case studies and interview analysis, focused on examples of self-managed companies that have decentralized their management structures with the aid of technological tools. The interview was conducted with a former employee at The Morning Star Company based in Los Banos, California, the largest tomato processing company in the United States. CHAPTER ONE: Firm Organization and Market Structures Theories of the Firm In today’s hyper culture of finance and business, firms are very natural organisms. Consumers make thousands of decisions per day that reward or penalize certain firms with their business. Politicians are always sure to discuss the impact of legislation on “small business” and entrepreneurs with firms. City councils, state legislatures, and executive branches of federal governments busy themselves with regulation of firms for the sake of public interest. Entire television channels, websites, and newspapers are dedicated to assessing the inherit value and stock options of firms, and globalization has allowed many firms to expand their economic influence into cultures and countries never 4 before thought possible. Each year, leagues of passionate young people enter business schools in hopes of forming their own firms and striking it rich while providing a superior product or service. Among OECD countries, an average of 90 percent of the working population is employed in the private sector, either in a firm or as a self-employed entrepreneur themselves (The World Bank 2016). What this number represents, at least in the industrialized West, is that a significant portion of total employment is in the private, not public sector. That means that private firms are responsible for nearly all of a nation’s economic power and growth, and thus the ability of the market to prosper is an important factor in whether a nation will attain wealth and provide for its people. As such, investigating how these firms operate and are structured is an important study for understanding how wealth is created and sustained, and how those examples can be implemented or learned from elsewhere. This is a vital contribution of modern economics, and is why many economists have been awarded Nobel Memorial Prizes for their research into the theory of the firm (including but not limited to Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon, George Stigler, Oliver Hart, Elinor Ostrom, and Oliver Williamson). The neoclassical approach to understanding the origin of firms rests upon the idea that resources are scarce, individuals are rational, and that entrepreneurs form firms in order to gain profits using relevant information and technology to maximum utility (Hart 1995). Further questions on the internal structures of firms and the frictions that occur within sparked the additional approaches of exploring transaction costs, property rights, and contracts, which set forth explanatory motivations for specific natures and structures of firms. And while each approach shed additional light on motivations and structures of firms, several factors have brought made it necessary to update these theories. 5 Considering today’s global economy is so reliant on knowledge and technology instead of physical production and assets, for example was not foreseen by early researchers. That has driven economists to try to adapt and modernize the existing theories of the firm for the 21st century. One area that has certainly changed considering those contexts has been governing hierarchies within firms. The Firm’s Hierarchy When explaining why firms are different from markets (markets being where people freely exchange goods and services), economist Oliver Williamson offered the notion that firms are extensions of markets, and that they therefore employ different methods to reduce transaction costs. The main structure is the hierarchy, the internal organization of the firm, but it doesn’t differ so much from what happens outside the firm. “I maintain that hierarchy is not merely a contractual act but is also a contractual instrument, a continuation of market relations by other means” (Williamson, 1991, p. 271). This hierarchy, housed within the firm, is the main concern to investigate in these
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