One share–one vote is optimal not so much because it gives shareholders the right incentives to take decisions, but rather because it forces someone who wants to obtain control of the company to acquire a share of the company’s dividend stream commensurate with this control#
What is required for a theory of asset ownership is that there is some inefficiency in the economic relationship, which the allocation of residual control rights can influence… ownership matters since it determines the outcome if bargaining breaks down.#
To develop a theory of the firm, one must analyse a situation where the first-best cannot be guaranteed, i.e. where reputational forces are not strong enough to eliminate all problems of opportunism.#
Neoclassical theory is consistent with there being one huge firm in the world, with every existing firm (General Electric, Exxon, Unilever, British Petroleum, . . . ) being a division of this firm. It is also consistent with every plant and division of an existing firm becoming a separate and
independent firm. To distinguish between these possibilities, it is necessary to introduce factors not present in the
neoclassical story.#
One share–one vote protects shareholder property rights in the sense that it maximizes the chance that a control contest will be won by a management team that provides high value for shareholders, rather than high private benefits for itself.#
Power is a scarce resource that should never be wasted. One implication of the theory is that a merger between firms with highly complementary assets is value-enhancing, and a merger between firms with independent assets is value-reducing.#
Firms arise in situations where people cannot write good contracts and where the allocation of power or control is
therefore important.#
The distinguishing mark of the firm is the supersession of the price mechanism.#
If we consider the operation of a sales tax, it is clear that it is a tax on market transactions and not on the same transactions organised within the firm.#
A firm, therefore, consists of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur.#
The costs of organising and the losses through mistakes will increase with an increase in the spatial distribution of the transactions organised, in the dissimilarity of the transactions, and in the probability of changes in the relevant prices.#
Any form of organization capable of establishing and enforcing ordered social relationships among a large community of persons will necessarily depend on a radical inequality in the assignment of decision-making capabilities to those who exercise the prerogative for allocating and controlling the decision-making capabilities exercised by others.#