Self-Interest: the Economist's Straitjacket
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Self-Interest: The Economist’s Straitjacket Robert Simons Working Paper 16-045 Self-Interest: The Economist’s Straitjacket Robert Simons Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-045 Copyright © 2015, 2019 by Robert Simons Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Self-Interest: The Economist’s Straitjacket Robert Simons Harvard Business School [email protected] Third Version January 31, 2019 Comments and Suggestions Appreciated* This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists, regulatory economists, macro economists, and enlightened economists—and illustrates the extent to which each tribe has been captured by the concept of self-interest. After arguing that this fixation has caused—and is likely to continue to cause—significant harm to our economy, the paper then presents an alternative approach based on a theory of business and discusses the implications for research and public policy. Keywords: self-interest, economists, moral philosophers, agency theory, regulation, capture, organization design, economic theory, organization theory, management theory, business education, competition, customers, commitment, controls, boundaries. * I am grateful for comments and suggestions provided on an earlier draft by David Bell, Jan Bouwens, Joe Bower, Frank Cespedes, Tony Dávila, Henry Eyring, Bob Kaplan, Natalie Kindred, Sunil Gupta, Jay Lorsch, Asis Martinez-Jerez, Warren McFarlan, Susanna Gallani, Henry Mintzberg, Nitin Nohria, Krishna Palepu, Karthik Ramanna, Julio Rotemberg, Ethan Rouen, Raffaella Sadun, Tatiana Sandino, Len Schlesinger, Jee Eun Shin, Eugene Soltes, Suraj Srinivasan, Mike Tushman, Ania Wieckowski, and David Yoffie. 1 Self-Interest: The Economist’s Straitjacket “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.” Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve1 In this paper, I critique the economic theories that are used to describe—and prescribe— principles of business organization. Specifically, I focus on the theories that are taught in business schools and animate public policy debates about how firms should be designed and managed. My goal is to cast a critical eye on existing practice and, more importantly, suggest an alternative formulation that may better reflect business realities. In doing so, I hope to generate interest—and spark debate—among scholars who develop and teach theories about how businesses should be organized, managed, and controlled. It will come as no surprise that the views of economists carry great weight when discussing business organization and design (Ferraro, Pfeffer, and Sutton, 2005). Economists are widely perceived as the most important and powerful of all social science disciplines (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan, 2015). Their ideas underpin many of the policies that facilitate the functioning of markets and, within businesses, the economist’s influence is felt in everything from governance processes and executive pay to choices of decentralization and accounting policies. For example, a recent analysis of mentions of the term “economist” in The New York Times (“How Economists Came to Dominate the Conversation”) shows that one in every hundred articles on all topics refers to the views of an economist, dwarfing the influence of other academic disciplines. Similarly, an analysis of mentions in the Congressional Record shows that economists dominate other academic disciplines by a wide margin.2 As a result of this high level of influence, economists—and the assumptions on which their prescriptions are based—attract much of the credit (and some of the blame) for the overall health of business and the economy (see, for example, Campbell-Verduyn, 2017; Litan, 2014). Of course, such preeminence is not without risks. Some scholars worry, for example, that academic economists may be susceptible to conflicts of interest in their policy prescriptions. In voicing such a concern, Zingales (2013) builds on the literature of regulatory capture to argue that economists risk being captured by the very businesses and regulators they collect data from and study. This possibility is probably remote, however, since academics don’t typically have the 1 Testimony before House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, October 23, 2008. 2 Justin Wolfers, “How Economists Came to Dominate the Conversation,” The New York Times, January 23, 2015. 1/31/2019 2 same incentives or revolving doors that are common among regulators where the concept of capture originated (Stigler, 1971; Carpenter and Moss, 2014). In this paper, I focus on a different kind of capture: the unquestioning and universal acceptance by economists of self-interest—of shareholders, managers, and employees—as the conceptual foundation for business design and management. This focus on self-interest as the key building block for organization theory is relatively new. Up through the 1970s, economists modelled the firm and its managers as an equilibrium- seeking black box that could be represented by marginal revenue and marginal cost curves. Gibbons (2000) recaps the state of affairs at that time, For two hundred years, the basic economic model of a firm was a black box: labor and physical inputs went in one end; output came out the other, at minimum cost and maximum profit. Most economists paid little attention to the internal structure and functioning of firms or other organizations. During the 1980s, however, the black box began to open: economists (especially those in business schools) began to study incentives in organizations, often concluding that rational, self-interested organization members might well produce inefficient, informal, and institutionalized organizational behaviors. This breakthrough—the insight that rational self-interest (coupled with utility maximization, opportunism, and effort aversion) could serve as a theoretical and mathematical foundation for modelling and prescribing individual behavior in organizations—served as a powerful rallying call for economists. Adopting a stripped-down, stylized view of organization functioning, Jensen & Meckling (1976) set the stage by asserting that “most organizations are simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals” (p. 310). Using this simplifying assumption as a backdrop, they go on to describe the contracts, incentives, monitoring devices, and bonding mechanisms that define a prototypical agency relationship. Building on this contracting-between-individuals concept of organizations, economists have, for the past forty years, been fixated with the roles and rights of senior executives and shareholders—all working from the fundamental assumption of self-interest, opportunism, and effort aversion. To explore the implications of this defining assumption, I divide the paper into two parts. In the first part, I present a model of capitalist economies and link this model to the theories developed and taught by economists. Using this taxonomy, I argue that different tribes of economists promote very different ideas about how to design and manage a business. But, regardless of tribe—with their inherently different policy prescriptions—all economists have been captured in one way or another by the concept of self-interest. This “conceptual straitjacket,” I argue, has had profound (and sometimes harmful) effects on the functioning of business organizations, government policies, and the overall health of the economy. 1/31/2019 3 In the second part of the paper, I offer an alternative framework for business design and functioning based on commitment to customers and a special type of controls. This alternative approach, I argue, is much closer to the way that effective business leaders actually manage and, if modelled in economic theory, will allow a return to policies and techniques that will stimulate increased competitiveness, growth, and value creation. I. The Fundamentals of Capitalism 1.1 A Schematic Model of Capitalism To ground my analysis, it is necessary to revisit the first principles of economics to map the underlying structure of the market-based capitalist system. Therefore, as a starting point, I offer (as a hypothesis) that the essence of the capitalist system—and its ability to create unparalleled wealth—can be modeled schematically as follows: → → (1) (2) Business (3) (4) Activity The two terms on left-hand side of the model represent the essence of capitalism as described by Adam Smith. The self-interest of atomistic actors coupled with freedom of opportunity results in the unleashing of individual effort, entrepreneurial activity, and innovation (Phelps, 2009). Fueled by self-interest, each individual can create his or her own opportunities. In the capitalist system, every individual enjoys the freedom to work as hard as he or she wants and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Thus, the capitalist system is often called the ‘free enterprise system’ recognizing Hayek’s insight that one of the greatest virtues of capitalism is the