Organizational Diseconomies of Scale

Abstract

This paper models strategic behavior within firms. The principal (e.g., the firm's owner) is handicapped by not knowing as much about the firm's capabilities as the agent(s) (e.g., the manager). The agent can extract some rents from his private information. The principal can retrieve some of these rents at the expense of introducing a distortion, paying the agent less than the full value of his marginal product. As a result the firm operates inefficiently. The degree of this inefficiency varies with demand elasticity and with the length of the firm's managerial hierarchy. The costs of operating the hierarchy create a limit to the size of the firm.