Centralization Versus Delegation and the Value of Communication
探讨集权与分权的利弊，指出经典启示原理在沟通成本为零时才成立，而现实中沟通成本高、管理者能力有限，这解释了为何企业选择分权。
Management literature has long debated the comparative advantages of centralized versus decentralized decision making. The usual framework of analysis focuses on an organization that consists of a principal (central management, headquarters) and one or several agents (local managers, divisions). Centralization, it is argued, allows the principal to retain control over important decisions. On the other hand, relevant information is generally dispersed among the members of the organization. To exploit the relevant information for decision making the principal must either elicit information or delegate decision making. Delegation has not played a prominent role in the work on incentive mechanisms. For the most part, this work has focused on revelation mechanisms in which all agents communicate their information to the principal who then makes all the decisions. The Revelation Principle asserts that the maximum performance attainable by some incentive mechanism can be replicated by a revelation mechanism. In particular, any mechanism involving delegation of decision making can, without loss of performance, be replaced by a completely centralized mechanism. The reasoning of the Revelation Principle, however, is valid only in a world of unlimited and costless communication. Firms decentralize, as the management literature points out (see, for example, Kaplan [1982]), precisely because communication is costly and managers have limited abilities to communicate and to process information. These costs and limitations seem essential to explaining the creation of organizational