Economic Behaviour within Organizations

This book provides a comprehensive economic analysis of the internal working of organizations.

Stephen A. Hoenack (Author)

9780521069090, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 July 2008

308 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

This book provides a comprehensive economic analysis of the internal working of organizations. Its attention to the role of information costs in influencing the breadth of discretion that members of an organization have, and the nature and effectiveness of the constraints that can be put upon them, leads to many important hypotheses about organizational behavior. These hypotheses are relevant to both private and public organizations, to charitable and profit-making ones, to bureaucracies and legislatures, and to organizations in free market and centrally planned economies. Stephen Hoenack proposes that managers' optimal choices of constraints in the face of information costs ordinarily leave subordinates with some latitude to use resources in pursuit of their own objectives. Employees can thus create an economy within the organization that responds to their goals as well as to the demands of external constituents.

1. Introduction
2. Definitions and determinants of employees' discretion over an organization's resources and production
3. Employees' resource diversions and employers' imposition of resource responsibility
4. Short-run resource allocation under fixed budgets
5. Short-run resource allocation in response to demand: the cases of an employee, a private corporation, and a private nonprofit organization
6. Legislative demand and short-run price and output of the public organization
7. Employees' investment behaviour and implications for suborganization
8. Equilibrium behaviour of public and private organizations in the first long run
9. The demand and supply of nonmarket resource allocation
10. A brief summary and proposed directions for further work.

Subject Areas: Industry & industrial studies [KN]