Works
- Hierarchies and the organization of knowledge in production, Journal of Political Economy 108(5), 874 to 904, 2000
- Organizing for synergies, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2(4), 77 to 114, 2010
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Organizational economics of hierarchy and knowledge.
Ideas
Organizing for synergies. With Dessein and Gertner, a model of the hybrid of business units and central functions. Caveat: A formal model.
The knowledge-based hierarchy. Showed that, when matching problems with those who know how to solve them is costly, a knowledge-based hierarchy is a natural way to organize the acquisition of knowledge: production workers learn the most common or easiest problems, and specialized problem solvers deal with the more exceptional or harder ones. Caveat: A formal model, which the paper says is consistent with stylized facts and uses to analyze how changes in production and information technology affect design.