|
The Conduct of Economics: The Example
of Fisher Body and General Motors
RONALD COASE
The University of Chicago Law School
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637
1. The Question
The events leading to the acquisition of Fisher Body by General Motors
(GM) were said by Benjamin Klein, in a paper published in 1998, to be
“[p]erhaps the most extensively discussed example in the economic literature
of a hold-up due to the presence of specific investments” (Klein,
1998, p. 241). Joel Trachtman, discussing opportunistic behavior in 1997,
refers to the “classic example of Fisher Body and General Motors”
(Trachtman, 1997, p. 521). More recently, in 2003, Douglas Baird noted
that the merger of Fisher Body and GM had become “the paradigmatic
example of vertical integration” (Baird, 2003, p. 24). Writing in 2004,
Hideshi Itoh and Hodaka Morita refer to “the famous General Motors-
Fisher Body example” (Itoh and Morita, 2004, p. 2). And there are many
other references of a like nature. Certainly, as Oliver Williamson has
correctly said, this example has been “widely used” (Williamson, 2002,
p. 182). The problem with this widely used example is that the events, so
minutely described, never happened. In this paper, I will consider what
it is about the conduct of economics that led so many able economists
to choose error rather than truth.
| 
发帖
雷达卡
61752.rar
(156.59 KB, 需要: 5 个论坛币)
本附件包括：
jg-xs1
京公网安备 11010802022788号
论坛法律顾问：王进律师
知识产权保护声明
免责及隐私声明
