The Psychological Design of Firm Boundaries: Preempting Escalating Commitment through Buy vs. Make
研究了管理者如何通过购买而非制造决策，在心理和组织上与产品保持距离，从而预防升级承诺，利用时尚产业数据表明企业会外包高风险产品以规避认知偏差导致的内部交易成本。
Strong ownership of the product development process, while facilitating the generation of new products, can exacerbate escalating commitment and impede timely termination. We examine how managers, with foresight, use buy vs. make decisions to create psychological and organizational distance from a product and preempt escalating commitment. Using detailed product-level data from the fashion industry and its unique features, we show that managers contract manufacture risky products even when they can be readily manufactured in-house, especially core products that are central to a firm’s identity and hence more prone to escalating commitment. Our findings highlight cognitive bias as a source of internal transaction cost and bring its preemption to the forefront of buy vs. make decisions. Our study develops a cognitive foundation for transaction cost theory that does not depend on opportunism or asset specificity and highlights the psychological designing of firm boundaries as a strategy for improving the decision environment.