Knowledge of the Firm and the Evolutionary Theory of the Multinational Corporation
研究了跨国公司为何比市场更有效地进行知识跨境转移，发现技术越难编码和传授，企业越倾向于通过全资子公司而非外部合作来转移，支持了企业作为知识转移与重组专门组织的演化理论。
Firms are social communities that specialize in the creation and internal transfer of knowledge. The multinational corporation arises not out of the failure of markets for the buying and selling of knowledge, but out of its superior efficiency as an organizational vehicle by which to transfer this knowledge across borders. We test the claim that firms specialize in the internal transfer of tacit knowledge by empirically examining the decision to transfer the capability to manufacture new products to wholly owned subsidiaries or to other parties. The empirical results show that the less codifiable and the harder to teach is the technology, the more likely the transfer will be to wholly owned operations. This result implies that the choice of transfer mode is determined by the efficiency of the multinational corporation in transferring knowledge relative to other firms, not relative to an abstract market transaction. The notion of the firm as specializing in the transfer and recombination of knowledge is the foundation to an evolutionary theory of the multinational corporation.