Ownership and power structure: Together at last

Economists have largely ignored the deep interdependency between integration and delegation. This column describes a new theory of integration and delegation choices aimed at shedding light on how these distinct elements of organisational design interact. Contrary to what is suggested by a naïve one-dimensional approach, the model predicts that delegation and outsourcing should be negatively correlated, a prediction that holds up well when the model is applied to data for thousands of firms across many industries and countries.

Vox column