Equilibrium Growth of the Hierarchical Firm: Shareholder-Employee Cooperative Game Approach
研究企业内部基于资历的雇佣结构下，价值最大化投资决策是否有效，并分析股东与在职雇员权力平衡变化对投资、就业和工资的影响，为1970年代实际工资与资本积累负相关提供微观解释。
In recent years an implication of a classic paper by Wassily Leontief (1946), that is, the possible inefficiency of the profit-maximization principle within a certain bargaining framework, has attracted the attention of economists. Faced with the increased possibility of such inefficiency due to the emergence of firm-specific employment structures in large enterprises, explorations into the possible modes of efficient and/or equilibrium bargains over wage-employment constellations have become a topic of recent research by economists, most notably, Robert Hall and David Lilien (1979), and Ian McDonald and Robert Solow (1981), among others. This paper investigates a similar and related problem: supposing that the firm internalizes its own employment structure organized on the seniority principle, is the value-maximization rule for investment decision making efficient? If it is not, can we determine the proper rule for striking a balance between the time preference of the shareholder body and that of the employee body? This problem will be dealt with in the framework of the cooperative game model of the firm as developed in my 1980 paper. It will be shown that lower investment, rationing of new jobs, and higher pay rates are the consequences of a shift in the power balance within the firm in favor of the incumbent employees vis-a-vis the shareholder body. This analysis will attempt to provide an integrated micro explanation of a widely observed macro phenomena in the 1970's, that is, the negative relationship between the real wage and capital accumulation, or between the real wage and employment (see, for example, Edmond Malinvaud, Pentti Kouri, and Jeffrey Sachs). The plan of the paper is as follows. Section I describes the model of the corporate firm internalizing employment structure hierarchically ordered upon the seniority principle. Section II derives the coalitional equilibrium values of the endogenous variables of the model as a cooperative game solution. It is shown that, in the determination of the equilibrium growth rate of the firm, gains from growth of the firm accruable to employees in the form of possible promotions must be taken into account to a degree determined by the power balance between the shareholders and the incumbent employees. But under what types of institutional mechanisms can the time preference of employees be incorporated into the corporate policymaking? Section III describes three highly stylized institutional models of shareholderemployee-manager relationships with a view to their efficiency implications. The Appendix gives some technical results.