Managerialism revisited in the light of bargaining-game theory

This lecture proposes to view the modern firm as a coalition of shareholders, employees, and business partners, rather than to identify it with a single maximizer such as an entrepreneur. This view may be thought of as a revival of the original thought of managerialism, but tries to go further by analyzing implications of the interactions of those agents on the behavior of the firm in a bargaining-game theoretic framework. The lecture reviews the literature on game theoretic approaches to the theory of the firm, and discusses a few important theoretical and institutional issues.