企业家的企业理论
作者简介：杨其静 ，男,1972年12月出生，1999年09月师从于中国人民大学杨瑞龙教授，于2002年06月获博士学位。
摘 要
本文尝试着从企业家角度来认识企业的本质，并力图逻辑一贯地揭示企业的各种契约和组织关系形成与演变的一些规律。
我们注意到主流企业理论基本上是以“资本家”作为逻辑起点和研究焦点，在本质上是“资本家的企业理论”：要么以“股东利益至上”为理论基础，着重研究制度应该如何安排才能最大限度地维护和增进股东的利益；要么以“资本强权观”为理论基础，着重研究财产所有权应该如何配置才最有效率。虽然该框架对很多现象具有强大的解释力，但这并不意味它已有了坚实的理论基础和严谨的逻辑，因为该框架还存在着一些不应该被忽视的缺陷：第一，许多关键性的权利（rights）（比如剩余索取权）或者权力(power)（比如剩余控制权）都是先验给定的，其内涵、外延以及存在基础并未得到严格考察；第二，过分依赖规范分析方法，却往往在有意或无意之间忽视了对企业实际的形成过程和运行规律的考察；第三，过分关注道德风险，尤其是与专用性投资相关的敲竹杠风险，以至于防止道德风险似乎成了企业制度安排或者企业治理的唯一内容；第四，基本上是以成熟企业，尤其是上市公司作为研究背景，而缺乏对创业阶段的研究。
自上世纪80年代以来，世界上主要的经济体日益呈现出“企业家经济” 和“知识经济”的性质，大量缺乏初始财富的企业家成功创业。在这些企业中，企业家并非一个简单地听命于外部投资者的代理人，他们所获的权利/权力也难以单纯地依靠非人力资本投资来解释。与此同时，许多企业的关键资源不再是那些专用性很强的实物资产，而且不少企业制度也并非为激励专用性投资而设计。由于主流分析框架难以对这些现象给出满意的解释，因此有必要换一个视角来审视企业，以便为企业理论找到一个更为合理的逻辑起点和更加坚实的理论基础。
“企业家”及其“创业活动”也许就是一个好的切入点。我们必须特别注意这样一个事实，即企业并不是天然物，而是企业家所创造的一种特殊组织。这就意味着，企业家及其创业活动是企业及其各种契约关系发生发展的天然起点，而且是一个相对洁净的起点，因为在这之前根本就不存在企业，当然就更谈不上企业内部的权利/权力关系。鉴于此，我们尝试着站在企业家的角度，采用比较彻底的个体主义的实证分析方法来研究企业内部的契约关系和组织。这也就是第一章的内容。
当我们强调企业是企业家所创立的时候，就必须首先回答这样一个问题，即企业家可否直接出售其创意而不必亲自创立企业？第二章对此作了回答。在批判“科斯设想”的基础上，我们指出，由于现实中企业家的创意和企业家能力难以被直接买卖，因此在通常情况下企业家必须亲自建立企业，以便把自己专有的企业家人力资本物化到这个特殊装置之中，从而转变为易于让度和定价的资产。由此可见，企业是作为企业家人力资本的“自我定价器”而被企业家创造出来的，而这也正是企业最初的性质。我们也由此可推断：如果国家限制创业活动，或者限制企业家在企业中的权利，那就会阻碍企业家人力资本的价值实现过程，从而会降低经济的活力。
由于充足的资本是开展创业活动的先决条件，所以企业家与外部投资者之间的契约关系值得特别关注，自然也就成为本文的研究重点。在第三章中，我们首先认识到现有的绝大多数所谓的“企业家融资模型”在本质上仍然是“资本家的投资理论”，而且没有充分认识到这些投资者的主要风险来自于企业家创意的可靠性和企业家能力的不足，而非企业家的“偷懒”等机会主义行为。更重要的是，投资者并不拥有先验性的超级权力/权利。作为产权交易的结果，外部投资者天然的或者必须获得的权利只是保留投资报酬索取权r和控制投资风险的权利——直接约束和影响企业家和企业活动的控制权C，直接从企业抽回投资的赎回权T，以及将企业产权让度给第三方的流动权L。当然，这些控制投资风险的权利（C, T, L）能够弱化投资者的参与条件；而且所有的这些契约权利之间存在复杂的互补和替代关系。
对于企业家来说，选择恰当的融资契约（r, C, T, L）十分重要。在第四章中，我们构造了一个关于企业家最佳融资契约安排的一般均衡模型，以便对其中的规律给出一些内生化的解释。我们首先证明了企业家为了自身利益最大化将自愿成为最后的剩余索取者，而将企业残值的优先索取权让度给外部投资者（定理1），即企业家将用自有资本为外部投资者提供某种担保服务。由此推导出一系列很有意义的结论，其中比较重要的结论有：（1）即使不受财富约束，也存在一个最佳的企业家自有投资比例（定理2）。（2）为了与为数有限的投资者保持长期的合作关系，权益性资本成为企业家的首选（定理4）。（3）企业家投入的自有资本比例越大，市场对其创意的价值和企业家能力的评价越高，那么企业家让度给外部投资者的控制权和股权（或者单位投资报酬索取权）就越小（定理6、7、8、9）。（4）融资契约通常允许当事人在事后根据情况的变化对初始的契约权利分配进行相机调整，尤其是当创业成功之后，外部投资者将自动丧失优于企业家的契约权利（定理10）。（5）我们由此推断“股权型可转换证券”及其类似契约组合将是企业家最常用的融资契约形式。（6）我们还指出，若企业家过早地与风险投资家合作，将导致权利过多的让度而不利于创业活动的成功。
在第四章的最后一节，我们研究了资本市场对企业家融资活动的影响。总的来说，我们认为资本市场降低了外部投资者的资产专用性程度，有利于弱化他们的参与条件，从而有利于刺激企业家的创业活动。由此，我们也推断，企业家经济的繁荣必须以高度发达的资本市场为基础。
沿着上述模型的逻辑，第五章研究了企业内部组织安排的形成和演变规律。我们首先批判了当前流行的“监工论”，强调企业家主要是企业的“制度设计师”，并且认识到企业组织制度的一个重要功能就是为了更好地利用分散的知识和能力。由此认识到，风险投资家往往是企业家团队的重要成员。此外，我们还证明“职业经理化”不但是企业家外部融资的必要条件，更是保证创业成功之后自己长远利益最大化的主动选择。
在本章的最后一节中，我们特别指出，随着企业家成功地将企业家人力资本物化在企业之中，企业家也就转变为一个普通股东。然而，此时的企业资产已不再是单纯的非人力资本，而是一个凝聚了企业家人力资本的生命体，即一个能够不断创造价值的特殊实体。也正是在这种情况下，包括企业家在内的股东才拥有了某种所谓的“资本强权”。
上述的这些研究又促使我们对现有的企业理论做进一步反思（第六章）。首先，只要把企业家作为企业之母，我们就会发现企业出现并不是对市场价格机制的简单替代，而是弥补了市场缺口，创造并拓展了市场。其次，我们发现“剩余索取权”并不是资本家的特权，而且不同当事人的“剩余索取权”的基础和性质是不相同的，所以笼统地断言“剩余索取者应该控制企业”或者“企业归剩余索取者所有”是不恰当的。与此同时，“剩余控制权”也不是一个严谨的概念，因为它的基础是“资本强权观”，而这种权力观不仅没有坚实的基础，而且也不能被逻辑一致的坚持到底。此外，我们认为企业治理问题的核心内容应该是关于组织租金的创造和分配，而且构成谈判力基础的不是专用性资产，而是不可或缺的专有性资产。我们建议应该认真考察不同企业参与者的权力基础和性质。最后，关于企业的边界，我们认为不应该把企业看作一堆机器设备，而应该把它视为一个相对稳定的获利能力的集合体。
关 键 词：企业家 企业的性质 融资契约 企业组织
Abstract
This dissertation makes an effort to recognize the nature of the firm in the entrepreneurial perspective and to disclose some rules of contracting and organizing in the firm.
We notice that the mainstream theories of the firm, with capitalist being their logic start and research focus, are virtually theories in the capitalistic perspective. Some of them base their conclusions upon the idea of stockholder's benefit being the supremacy, and emphasize ways of devising an institution to maintain and enhance stockholders' well being. Others are founded on an idea of capitalistic hegemony, and engage themselves in discovering how to efficiently allocate property rights. Unfortunately, such analytical frameworks don’t follow a solid and strict logic, although they appear powerful in explaining substantive phenomena. There are actually four defects which should not be ignored within the frameworks. Firstly, some pivotal rights or power, such as residual claims and residual rights of control, are transcendentally provided without any scrupulous inspection of their intensions, extensions and foundations. Secondly, they depend overly on the approach of normal analysis, ignoring the forming process and practical rules of institutions. Thirdly, They pay so much attention on moral hazards, especially on hold-up problems related to specific investments, that how to deal with moral hazards becomes almost the only content of institutional arrangements or corporate governance. Finally, they select mature enterprises, most of which are public ones, as the research background, but neglect to study the initial establishing phase of a business venture.
The 1980s' witnessed an advent of entrepreneurial economy as well as knowledge economy around the world. Many entrepreneurs attribute success in founding their own firms without plentiful original fortune. In their firms, those entrepreneurs are not agents merely submitted to exterior investors, nor can their rights or power be explained in the light of non-human capital. We also find that critical resources in many enterprises are no longer those strongly specific assets and that many institutions are not incentive-devised for specific investment. Obviously, we can hardly explain those phenomena in the light of mainstream theories. It’s necessary for us to resort to a new perspective on the study of the firm, and search out a more reasonable logic start as well as a harder footstone for the theory of the firm.
Entrepreneur, along with his innovation, perhaps is the proper alternative. We must recognize that any firm is not spontaneous but created by the entrepreneur, thus the firm's start is naturally the entrepreneur who setting up it. Moreover, it is also a clean logic start because there couldn't be any firm without the entrepreneur, not to say arrangements of power or right inside the firm. In another word, the entrepreneur's innovation is the precondition and beginning of particular relationships in the firm. Hence, we try thoroughly adopting a positive approach and individualism in the entrepreneurial perspective to study the firm as well as the formation and evolvement of relative agents' right or power.
The above forms the content of chapter 1. Then, as we emphasis that the firm is set up by certain entrepreneur, the first question confronted is why the entrepreneur sets up the firm by himself but not to sell his idea to others. Chapter 2 answers it. We firstly criticize the Coase’s Imagination. Since the entrepreneur's idea and capability are unable to be traded directly, he has to found by himself a business venture, a special device, to embody his special entrepreneurship and transfer it into assets more easily priced and alienated. Thus, it can be concluded that the firm built by the entrepreneur is a self-pricing device of his own human capital. We can further deduce that if a nation sets limits to the entrepreneur's innovation or rights in the firm, the value-realizing process for entrepreneurship therein will be hampered and vigor of its economy will conclusively be impaired.
Inasmuch as enough capital is a precondition for an entrepreneur to start-up his firm, the contracting between the entrepreneur and the investor is worth of intensive attention and is naturally the utmost important part in this dissertation. In Chapter 3, we firstly point out that most so-called entrepreneurial financing models are actually capitalist-investing theories. Meanwhile, they fail to realize that investor's primary risks don’t come from the entrepreneur's opportunistic actions like shirking, but from the reliability of entrepreneurial ideas, insufficiency of entrepreneurship and etc. More important, the investor never owns transcendental superpower or super-rights. As an outcome of property transactions, the natural rights gained by the investor will be no more than the rights to retain the reserved claim for investment r and other rights to control investment risk. The latter includes three kinds of rights that are the control right C to directly restrict and influence the entrepreneur and his activities, the redemption right T to straightly withdraw investment from the firm and the liquidity right L to alienate the ownership of the firm to others. Rights (C, T, L) are used to weaken the investor’s participating conditions. Moreover, it can be proved that there are very complicated substitute and complement relationships among those contractual rights (r, C, T, L). Consequently, what financing contracts the entrepreneur chooses becomes critical to him.
In chapter 4, we set up a general equilibrium model of the entrepreneur's optimal financing contract and offer some endogenetic solutions to it. We prove that the entrepreneur, who pursues maximizing his own interest, will voluntarily choose to be the final residual claimer and give the prior claim to the exterior investor (Theorem 1). It means that the entrepreneur's own capital basically functions as a guarantee for the exterior investor. We whereafter get a series of significant conclusions on the base of theorem 1. (1) An optimal proportion of the entrepreneur's own capital probably exists even without wealth restriction (Theorem 2). (2) The entrepreneur tends to choose an equity-like contract so as to keep long-term collaboration with his limited investors (Theorem 4). (3) The higher the entrepreneur's own capital proportion and the market evaluation for his idea and entrepreneurship, the smaller the exterior investor's control and stock share. (Theorem 6,7,8,9) (4) The financing contract usually allows agents to ex post adjust the optimal right arrangements contingently. In particular, the exterior investor often loses rights prior to the entrepreneur after the firm is successfully established (Theorem 10). (5) It's reasonable to infer that convertible preferable stock and securities alike are the most common financing contracts adopted by the entrepreneur, because they take on characters mentioned above. (6) We also suggest that the entrepreneur will lose many rights and endanger his firm if he seeks for venture capital too early.
In the last part of Chapter 4, we study how the financial markets influence entrepreneurial financing. Financial markets reduce the specificity of an exterior investor's assets and reveal the information of his characteristic, which will benefit the entrepreneur’s innovations. Therefore, we believe that the developed financial markets are the ground of the entrepreneurial economy.
Followed by the above model, we examine the rules of the organization /institution in Chapter 5. In the first, we point out that the entrepreneur primarily doesn’t play as monitor but as institution designer. One important function of the organization is to take more advantage of disperse knowledge and capability; hence the venture capitalist is an important member in the entrepreneur team. Moreover, we certify that managerial professionalism is not only a prerequisite for the entrepreneur to get exterior financing, but also the entrepreneur's voluntary selection to ensure his own benefit after successful innovation.
At the final section of chapter 5, we stress that the entrepreneur will change into an ordinary stockholder after he successfully embodies the entrepreneurship in the firm. Now the firm's assets, however, are not pure non-human capital any longer, but an organism agglomerated the entrepreneur's human capital. It’s under such conditions that stockholders including the entrepreneur own some kind of capitalistic hegemony.
It's necessary to retrospect existing theory of the firm in Chapter 6 after our analysis. (1) In the first, once we find that the entrepreneur is the mother of the firm, we will subsequently discover that the radical function of the firm is not simply to replace the price mechanism, but to fill market gaps and create and extend markets. (2) Secondly, we detect that residual claims are not capitalists' privilege. Because special residual claims have their own bases and characteristics, it is not exact to assert that “the firm should be controlled by the residual claimers” or “the residual claimers owned the firm”. (3) In our point of view, the concept of residual rights of control is not precise, which neither has a reliable base, nor can be applied harmoniously. So we suggest that scholars should carefully investigate the nature and the power base of different participators in the firm. (4) Meanwhile, we believe that the core of the corporate governance is to create and allocate the organizational rent and that the base of the bargaining power is the unique asset, not the specific assets referred. (5) Finally, upon the issue of the firm boundary，the firm should be treated not as a pile of facilities, such as machines and factories, but as a comparatively steady collection of growth opportunities.
Key Words: entrepreneur, nature of the firm, financial contract, firm organizations
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