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772
Separation of ownership and control
- JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS
, 1983
"... This paper analyzes the survival of organizations in which decision agents do not bear a major share of the wealth effects of their decisions. This is what the literature on large corporations calls separation of âownershipâ and âcontrol.â Such separation of decision and risk bearing functio ..."
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Cited by 1661 (8 self)
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This paper analyzes the survival of organizations in which decision agents do not bear a major share of the wealth effects of their decisions. This is what the literature on large corporations calls separation of âownershipâ and âcontrol.â Such separation of decision and risk bearing functions is also common to organizations like large professional partnerships, financial mutuals and nonprofits. We contend that separation of decision and risk bearing functions survives in these organizations in part because of the benefits of specialization of management and risk bearing but also because of an effective common approach to controlling the implied agency problems. In particular, the contract structures of all these organizations separate the ratification and monitoring of decisions from the initiation and implementation of the decisions.
Perspectives: Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability
, 1996
"... The problem of complex adaptations is studied in two largely disconnected research traditions: evolutionary biology and evolutionary computer science. This paper summarizes the results from both areas and compares their implications. In evolutionary computer science it was found that the Darwinian p ..."
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Cited by 223 (8 self)
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The problem of complex adaptations is studied in two largely disconnected research traditions: evolutionary biology and evolutionary computer science. This paper summarizes the results from both areas and compares their implications. In evolutionary computer science it was found that the Darwinian process of mutation, recombination and selection is not universally effective in improving complex systems like computer programs or chip designs. For adaptation to occur, these systems must possess "evolvability", i.e. the ability of random variations to sometimes produce improvement. It was found that evolvability critically depends on the way genetic variation maps onto phenotypic variation, an issue known as the representation problem. The genotype-phenotype map determines the variability of characters, which is the propensity to vary. Variability needs to be distinguished from variation, which are the actually realized differences between individuals. The genotype-phenotype map is the ...
The faculty of language: what’s special about it?
- Cognition
, 2005
"... We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent arguments by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g., words and conce ..."
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Cited by 153 (12 self)
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We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent arguments by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g., words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g., speech perception). We find this argument problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, and agreement. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments showing that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky’s recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest other arguments from Chomsky that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect, ” nonredundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.
Modularity in technology and organization
- Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
, 2002
"... This paper is an attempt to raid both the literature on modular design and the literature on property rights to create the outlines of a modularity theory of the firm. Such a theory will look at firms, and other organizations, in terms of the partitioning of rights—understood as protected spheres of ..."
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Cited by 126 (0 self)
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This paper is an attempt to raid both the literature on modular design and the literature on property rights to create the outlines of a modularity theory of the firm. Such a theory will look at firms, and other organizations, in terms of the partitioning of rights—understood as protected spheres of authority—among cooperating parties. And it will assert that organizations reflect nonmodular structures, that is, structures in which decision rights, rights of alienation, and residual claims to
Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control
, 2006
"... Permission is hereby granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document without royalty or fee. Permission is granted to quote excerpts from this documented provided the original source is properly cited. ii When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they ..."
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Cited by 124 (11 self)
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Permission is hereby granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document without royalty or fee. Permission is granted to quote excerpts from this documented provided the original source is properly cited. ii When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they may instead destructively interfere in unanticipated ways. These hazards limit the scale and functionality of the software systems we can successfully compose. This dissertation presents a framework for enabling those interactions between components needed for the cooperation we intend, while minimizing the hazards of destructive interference. Great progress on the composition problem has been made within the object paradigm, chiefly in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among benign components. We show how to extend this success to support robust composition of concurrent and potentially malicious components distributed over potentially malicious machines. We present E, a distributed, persistent, secure programming language, and CapDesk, a virus-safe desktop built in E, as embodiments of the techniques we explain.
The Programming Language Concurrent Pascal
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, 1975
"... The paper describes a new programming language for structured programming of computer operating systems. It extends the sequential programming language Pascal with concurrent programming tools called processes and monitors. Part I explains these concepts informally by means of pictures illustrating ..."
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Cited by 114 (1 self)
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The paper describes a new programming language for structured programming of computer operating systems. It extends the sequential programming language Pascal with concurrent programming tools called processes and monitors. Part I explains these concepts informally by means of pictures illustrating a hierarchical design of a simple spooling system. Part II uses the same example to introduce the language notation. The main contribution of Concurrent Pascal is to extend the monitor concept with an explicit hierarchy of access rights to shared data structures that can be stated in the program text and checked by a compiler.
Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era
, 2007
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Temporarily Divide to Conquer: Centralized, Decentralized, and Reintegrated Organizational Approaches to Exploration and Adaptation
- ORGANIZATION SCIENCE 14: 650–69
, 2003
"... To create a competitive advantage, firms need to find activ-ity configurations that are not only internally consistent, but also appropriate given the firm’s current environment. This challenge is particularly acute after firms have experienced an environmental change that has shifted the existing c ..."
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Cited by 81 (5 self)
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To create a competitive advantage, firms need to find activ-ity configurations that are not only internally consistent, but also appropriate given the firm’s current environment. This challenge is particularly acute after firms have experienced an environmental change that has shifted the existing competitive landscape and created new, high-performing sets of activity choices. How should firms organize to explore and search such an altered performance landscape? While it has been noted that adaptive entities need to maintain a balance of exploration and exploitation, little is known about how different organizational structures moderate this balance. With the help of an agent-based simulation model, we study the value of three different organizational structures: a centralized organization, in which decisions are made only at the level of the firm as a whole; a
