Organizational Design for Business Units
通过实证研究，分析母公司如何向业务单元分配任务以及如何设定业务单元经理的薪酬风险，发现母公司的相对专业知识和业务单元对母公司绩效的相对重要性是影响这些组织设计决策的关键因素。
This paper studies empirical differences across decentralized firms with respect to the allocation of tasks from the parent firm to its business units and the level of compensation risk imposed on business unit managers. We structure our empirical analysis around two hypothesized determinants of these organizational structure decisions: the parent firm's task expertise relative to that of the business unit's and the relative importance of the business unit to the performance of the parent firm. We develop a principal-agent model of the task allocation and compensation risk decisions as a function of these two determinants, and test several research hypotheses suggested by this model. In our analysis, we use the term relative expertise to refer to the competence of the parent, relative to the business unit manager, to make the division's operating decisions. Relative task expertise can be characterized in several ways; we consider three such characterizations and, using our model, find that they have different implications for the allocation of tasks and the imposition of compensation risk in decentralized firms.1 We label our three characterizations of relative expertise as follows: Cost