The Management Nexus of Imperfect Duty: Kantian Views of Virtuous Relations, Reasoned Discourse, and Due Diligence
提出不完全义务联结理论，解释企业如何通过有限度的积极承诺（如建立友好关系、理性对话和尽职调查）来补充基于完全义务的契约联结理论，并说明灵活权衡对发展商业关系的优势。
A nexus of imperfect duty, defined as positive commitments that have practical limits, describes business behavior toward building affable and virtuous relations, maintaining reasoned social discourse, and performing the due diligence necessary for making knowledgeable business decisions. A theory of the development and extent of the limits of these imperfect managerial duties is presented here, a theory that in part explains the activities and personnel included under the firm’s umbrella. As a result, the nexus of imperfect duty is shown to complement the perfect-duty-based nexus-of-contracts theory of the firm. The existence of flexible trade-offs involving these duties, trade-offs limited by contractual arrangements whether explicit or implicit, is shown to be one of the advantages of imperfect duty for developing business relations.