Diversification, Diseconomies of Scope, and Vertical Contracting: Evidence from the Taxicab Industry
研究了企业多元化后如何通过外包（纵向解体）来管理范围不经济，利用经济普查中出租车和豪华轿车车队的微观数据，发现出租车公司进入豪华轿车业务时会增加车主司机比例，且该效应在任务相似度更高的非城市市场更大。
This paper studies how firms reorganize following diversification, proposing that firms use outsourcing, or vertical disintegration, to manage diseconomies of scope. We also consider the origins of scope diseconomies, showing how different underlying mechanisms generate contrasting predictions about the link between within-firm task heterogeneity and the incentive to outsource following diversification. We test these propositions using microdata on taxicab and limousine fleets from the Economic Census. The results show that taxicab firms outsource, by shifting the composition of their fleets toward owner-operator drivers, when they diversify into the limousine business. The magnitude of the shift toward driver ownership is larger in less urban markets, where the tasks performed by taxicab and limousine drivers are more similar. These findings suggest that (1) firms use outsourcing to manage diseconomies of scope at a particular point in the value chain and (2) interagent conflicts can be an important source of scope diseconomies.