The Role of Cognition and Motivation in Understanding Internal Governance and Hierarchical Failure: A Discriminating Alignment Analysis
指出交易成本经济学忽视层级失败，通过引入不同层级形式下的具体动机（如努力、机会主义或合作），构建区分性匹配理论，预测层级失败何时发生并补充治理机制，帮助学者理解层级治理的成本与能力。
Transaction cost economics (TCE) carefully analyzes market failure while remaining largely silent about hierarchical failure. We argue this omission occurs because TCE’s opportunism assumption does not consider organizational member motivations under different hierarchical forms. Thus, TCE does not fully examine opportunistic behavior under hierarchy, resulting in an incomplete governance analysis. To fill this gap, we build a discriminating alignment theory of hierarchical choice that incorporates explicit motivations under each hierarchical form. We make three contributions to TCE with this theory. First, using the counterproductive work behavior and goal framing literatures, we predict specific motivations (effort, visceral, financial or status opportunism, or collaboration) across hierarchical forms. Second, we predict when “efficient” hierarchical forms (mapped from Williamson’s internal governance analysis) do not effectively mitigate opportunistic behavior, creating hierarchical failure. In these cases, we augment the hierarchical forms with supplemental governance mechanisms necessary to efficiently govern the exchange. Finally, we investigate how different motivations across hierarchical forms lead to excess misalignment costs to enhance our understanding of hierarchical failures. Examining how both transaction hazards and specific motivations drive particular behaviors allows for a more nuanced understanding of specific “costs and competencies” of hierarchy and in turn hierarchical failure in TCE.