替代、互补及互嵌:企业与市场关系的新考察

在现实世界中,企业市场关系呈现出替代、互补及互嵌等多种特征,使得单一的“替代”说或“互补”论均缺乏足够的解释力。本文从交易费用角度将交易关系分为三种类型并指出企业和市场谁更有利于交易费用的节约,主要取决于交易品的特征以及交易本身的具体职能。企业其实是一种通过非人力资本和人力资本、人力资本和人力资本间相互交易以实现生产功能的特殊履约机制。这样就不难理解,只有部分交易可以通过企业与市场间的相互替代来提高效率,而更多的交易则须通过改善企业内部管理或改进市场制度本身来提高其效率。

Substitution, Complementation and Embedment: The New Perspective on the Relationship between Firm and Market

In the realistic world, the relationship between the firm and market takes on many characteristics, such as substitution, complementation, embedment etc., which make the sole "substitution" theory or "complementation" theory lack enough explainable. The paper divides transaction relationship into three categories from the angle of transaction cost and points out whether the firm or the market is more beneficial to reducing transaction cost depends on the characteristics of the goods and the concrete functions of transaction itself. In fact, firm is a special mechanism of carrying out a contract, which accomplishes its production through the mutual exchange of manpower capital and non-manpower capital, manpower capital and manpower capital. Thus, it is not difficult to understand that the efficiency of a small portion of transactions can be increased through the mutual replacement of firm and market, while more of others by improving firm management or market system itself.