Four formal(izable) theories of the firm

By Robert Gibbons. 2005

736 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3aca6f7c41c76bb88d44e4ae735fa667e5bc834

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Citations in the corpus

Multi-product firms and product switching (2006, neutral): “36See Sutton (2005) for further discussion of firm capabilities and Gibbons (2004) for a survey of recent research on the boundaries of the firm. firms as well as in the distribution of products within firms.”
Cooperation between corporations and environmental groups: A transaction cost perspective (2007, background): “This investment in an inferior technology in order to improve one’s bargaining position may seem unlikely, but it has been documented in many for-profit transactions (Gibbons, 2005b).”
Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm (This paper is currently being revised) (2007, background): “…php?doi=10.1257/aer.100.1.466) actually details how this paper is complementary to most of the perspectives on the firm outlined in Gibbons (2005).3 But I also derive new insights on firm boundaries: I show how both differential confidence about the central decisions for a project…”
Does vertical integration affect firm performance? Evidence from the airline industry (2010, background): “Because ownership decisions are made by optimizing firms, measures of integration will typically be endogenous in a performance equation (see Masten, 1993; Gibbons, 2005).”
Coordinating and competing in ecosystems: How organizational forms shape new technology investments (2013, methodology): “…pursuing alliances with physicians are more likely to invest in new imaging technologies than hospitals pursuing integrated strategies offers some support for an important premise within the firm boundaries literature that there are both costs and benefits of integration (e.g., Gibbons, 2005).”
Multi-Sided Platforms (2015, neutral): “Our analysis is a cross between what Gibbons (2005) calls “the incentive system theory of the firm” and “the adaptation theory of the firm.””
Innovation Activities and Integration through Vertical Acquisitions (2019, background): “Gibbons (2005) summarizes the large literature and highlights that the costs and benefits of vertical integration depend on transactions costs, rent seeking, contractual incompleteness, and the specificity of the assets involved in transactions.”
The Resource-Based View: A Review and Assessment of Its Critiques (2010, background): “Their conclusion was that the RBV is indeed striving to be a theory of the firm, one that materially differs from other available theories of the firm, in particular from transaction cost economics (TCE; Williamson & Winter, 1991).”
Theories of the Firm-Market Boundary (2011, positive): “However, the decision to integrate is often taken to facilitate the formation of specific relationships among actors within the firm (cf. Kogut & Zander, 1996; see also Gibbons, 2005).”