Professional as Agent: Knowledge Asymmetry in Agency Exchange
从代理理论视角分析企业雇佣专业服务组织并授予有限决策权的交换，指出其与普通代理关系的区别，并提出四种控制专业代理人机会主义行为的机制。
In this article I examine those business exchanges in which firms hire professional service organizations and give them limited decisionmaking authority to perform knowledge-intensive tasks. I frame such exchanges within agency theory perspective and invoke the extant literature on professions to delineate several attributes that make principal-professional exchanges intrinsically distinct from others. such as owner-manager agency. In doing so. I question and complement same key assumptions in agency theory and also discuss explicitly how the study of principal-professional exchanges helps highlight important considerations not addressed in the mainstream theory. I then present an expanded framework that integrates agency theory and the literature on the professions and present several propositions to outline four types of restraints on potential opportunistic behavior of professional agents; (1) self-control, (2) community control, (3) bureaucratic control, and (4) client control. The article ends with t...