Hierarchies and the Organization of Knowledge in Production
研究沟通如何促进知识的专门化获取，证明当匹配问题与解决者成本高昂时，基于知识的层级是组织知识获取的自然方式，并分析生产与信息技术变化对组织设计的影响。
This paper studies how communication allows for the specialized acquisition of knowledge. It shows that a knowledge-based hierarchy is a natural way to organize the acquisition of knowledge when matching problems with those who know how to solve them is costly. In such an organization, production workers acquire knowledge about the most common or easiest problems confronted, and specialized problem solvers deal with the more exceptional or harder problems. The paper shows that the model is consistent with stylized facts in the theory of organizations and uses it to analyze the impact of changes in production and information technology on organizational design.