This paper develops a property rights perspective on the nature of the firm. The basic idea is that learning by doing in production and coordination stem from experience in production and that user rights over productive assets are necessary in order to accumulate the experience needed to perform improvements in production. Accumulation of skills from learning by doing in production is accelerated by specialization in production. However, specialization introduces greater complexity and new kinds of tools and equipment and this creates uncertainty about the best way of coordinating specialized interdependent activities. The result may be bottlenecks in production and uneven development of components. Experimenting in coordination is necessary in order to eliminate these problems. It is argued that the Coasian notion of firms where coordination is provided by the direction of managers provides a cheap way of conducting the experiments needed to collect information on how best to coordinate interdependent activities.

本文从产权的角度对企业的性质进行分析。其基本思想是，在生产过程中学习和协调来自于生产经验，为了积累改进生产所需的经验，用户对生产资产的权利是必要的。生产的专门化加快了在生产中边干边学的技能积累。然而，专业化带来了更大的复杂性和新种类的工具和设备，这就造成了关于协调专门化相互依赖活动的最佳方式的不确定性。其结果可能是生产瓶颈和组件开发不平衡。为了消除这些问题，有必要进行协调实验。有人认为，科斯关于协调由经理人指导的公司的概念，提供了一种廉价的方式来进行所需的实验，以收集如何最好地协调相互依赖的活动的信息。