تقسیم کار، هماهنگی سازمانی و ساز و کارهای بازار در حل مشکلات به صورت جمعی

This paper builds upon a view of economic organizations as problem-solving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problem-solving driven by trial-and-error learning and collective selection. Institutional structures and, in particular, their degree of decentralization, determine which solutions are tried out and undergo selection. It is shown that if the design problem at hand is “complex” (in terms of interdependencies between the elements of the system), then a decentralized institutional structure is unlikely ever to generate optimal solutions and, therefore, no selection process can ever select them. We also show that nearly-decomposable structures have, in general, a selective advantage in terms of speed in reaching (good) locally optimal solutions.

One way to describe any economy or, for that matter, any economic organization, is as a huge ensemble of partially interrelated tasks and processes that, combined in certain ways, produce “well-constructed” goods and services. It is a perspective that dates at least back to Adam Smith who identified a major driver of productivity growth in the progressive division of tasks themselves and the associated specialization among workers. More recently, several of Herbert Simon's seminal works have explored the general structure of problem-solving activities of which technological search and economic production activities are just subsets (Simon, 1969). From different angles, several investigations from the team theory perspective have addressed the symmetric problem concerning coordination amongst multiple interrelated tasks (Marschak and Radner, 1972, Radner, 2000 and Becker and Murphy, 1992). Finally, a flourishing literature has focussed on the “cognitive” characteristics of organizations (Richardson, 1972, Langlois and Robertson, 1995, Loasby, 1998, Teece et al., 1994 and Dosi et al., 2000).

In this paper, we have presented a novel model of ‘Simonian’ ascendancy concerning the properties of the division of problem-solving labor and we have accounted for the properties of different institutional arrangements and in particular for different boundaries between un-decomposed (in principle, organization-embodied) tasks and decomposed tasks (possibly coordinated via market-like mechanisms but also via mechanisms based on the interaction of quasi-independent units within simple organizations). The issue is basically one of organizational (and technological) design: can optimal organizational structures (or optimal technological designs) emerge out of decentralized local interactions? This paper, in fact, shows that this is only possible under some special and rather implausible conditions and that, on the contrary, the advantages of decentralization usually bear a cost in terms of sub-optimality.