Multifaceted Transactions and Organizational Ownership

Abstract

I provide a unified explanation for shareholder ownership, partnerships, mutuals, government ownership, cooperatives, and vertical and horizontal control: each ownership form constitutes a variation on a single underlying theme, the assignment of ownership to a subset of firm stakeholders. When not every facet of a transaction is contractible and high-powered incentives might divert investment toward the transaction’s contractible facets, to the overall transaction’s possible detriment, optimal organizational ownership allocates the right to set the power of managerial incentives to those stakeholders most affected by the noncontractible facets of the organization’s paramount transaction.