Organizational Form and Efficiency: The Coexistence of Stock and Mutual Property-Liability Insurers
提出跨前沿分析方法，比较股份与互助财产责任保险公司的效率，检验管理自由裁量权和费用偏好假说，发现两种组织形式代表不同技术，且股份公司在成本效率上占优。
This article introduces a new approach, cross-frontier analysis, for estimating the relative efficiency of alternative organizational forms in an industry. The technique is illustrated by analyzing a sample of stock and mutual property-liability insurers using nonparametric frontier efficiency methods. Cross-frontier analysis measures the relative efficiency of each organizational form by computing the efficiency of each stock (mutual) firm relative to a reference set consisting of all mutual (stock) firms. We test agency-theoretic hypotheses about organizational form, including the managerial discretion and expense preference hypotheses. The results indicate that stocks and mutuals are operating on separate production and cost frontiers and thus represent distinct technologies. Consistent with the managerial discretion hypothesis, the stock technology dominates the mutual technology for producing stock outputs and the mutual technology dominates the stock technology for producing mutual outputs. However, consistent with the expense preference hypothesis, the stock cost frontier dominates the mutual cost frontier. Our findings thus suggest a richer interpretation of organizational form than provided by previous researchers.