演講者簡介 : Professor Michael Raith received his Ph.D. from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1996. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester. His research interests are organizational economics and industrial organization.
演講摘要 : I develop a theory of employment that builds on, refines, and generalizes Simon's (1951), and compare employment with its closest alternative, sequential spot contracting for labor. In my model, an entrepreneur and a wealth-constrained worker face two-sided incomplete information about the benefits and costs, respectively, associated with different tasks. Employment is a relational contract that requires the worker to provide his service and to follow the entrepreneur's direction, for a wage. I show that consistent with historical and anecdotal evidence, employment helps a firm to secure a predictable supply of labor and to avoid the "transaction costs" of market trade. Employment can be profitable for a firm even if it is inefficient. Adaptation to an uncertain environment may or may not play a role, and when it does, then contracting is no less capable than employment of achieving adaptation, contrary to a common view about the advantage of employment. Nevertheless, employees do tend to have multiple tasks because bundling multiple tasks into jobs may be necessary for employment to be economically viable. Overall, the paper sheds new light on the nature of employment, on job design, and on the origins of capitalist production.
