The future of corporate governance in knowledge-dispersed companies.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18041/1900-0642/criteriolibre.2012v10n17.1144Keywords:
Corporate governance, companies, KnowledgeAbstract
Corporate governance focuses its attention on the structure of the firm and the allocation of decision rights between owners and managers basically, plus other stakeholders. The field has developed extensively during the last decades inspiring reforms and practices as well as learning from them. Most of the analysis though takes into consideration the XXth Century firm, rightfully so since CG is a very practical field in the overlapping map of law, economics and finance. The firm has probably been one of the most successful institutional innovations of the last centuries. Five hundred years ago only a few of them existed, today they are pervasive. Nevertheless, we cannot expect the firm to be the same a hundred years from now as it is today. And if companies are going to be different, how will their corporate governance be affected? The present article does not expect to give an answer to such question. It only attempts to provoke debate and speculation about a possible evolution of the firm based on one single aspect of change: the increased use of dispersed knowledge. After suggesting some development and analyzing present innovations in that direction, we will open up to consideration how those potential changes may affect corporate governance. Of course, there are no specific conclusions, just a call to open our minds to future possible scenarios.
Downloads
References
Berg, JE; Nelson, FD & Rietz, TA (2001). “Accuracy and forecast standard error for prediction markets”, Working Paper, The University of Iowa.
Bryan, Lowell L. (2004). “Making a market in knowledge”, The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 3.
Bryan, Lowell L., Claudia I. Joyce and Leigh M. Weiss (2006). “Making a market in talent”, The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 2.
Chan, Nicholas, Ely Dahan, Adlar Kim, Andrew Lo and Tomaso Poggio (2002). “Securities Trading of Concepts (STOC)”, Center for Biological and Computational Learning, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), January 23, 2002.
Coase, Ronald. “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica, Vol. 4, No. 16, November 1937, pp. 386-405. Hayek, F. A. von (1933), “The Trend of Economic Thinking”, 13 Economica, May, pp. 121-37.
Hayek, F. A. von (1945). “The use of knowledge in Society”, American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, pp. 519-30.
Hirshleifer, Jack (1956). “On the Economics of Transfer Pricing”, Journal of Business, 29, pp. 172-184.
Howe, Jeff (2008). Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, (New York: Crown Business).
Idinopulos, Michael & Lee Kempler (2003). “Do you know who your experts are?”, The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 4.
Jensen, Michael C. & William H. Meckling (1992). “Specific and General Knowledge, and Organizational Structure”, in Lars Werin & Hans Wijkander, eds., Contract Economics, (Blackwell, Oxford 1992), pp. 251-274.
Kiviat, Barbara (2004). “The End of Management?”, Time, Inside Business,
Tuesday, July 6, 2004.
Laubacher, Robert J., Thomas W. Malone and the MIT Scenario Working Group (1997). Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Working Paper 21 C WP #001, January.
Plott, Charles y Kai-Yut Chen (2002). “Information aggregation mechanisms: Concept, Design and Implementation for a Sales Forecasting Problem”, Social Science Working Paper 1131, California Institute of Technology, March 2002.
Smith, Vernon (2002). “Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics”, Prize Lecture, December 8, 2002.
Surowiecki, James (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds, (New York: Doubleday).
Varian, Hal R. (2003). “Can markets be used to help people make nonmarket decisions?, The New York Times, 8/5/03.
