Opportunism

About: Opportunism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2030 publications have been published within this topic receiving 97170 citations. The topic is also known as: opportunist.

Political Competition and Convergence to Fundamentals: With Application to the Political Business Cycle and the Size of Government

Abstract: We address the problem of how to investigate whether economics, or politics, or both, matter in the explanation of public policy. The problem is first posed in a particular context by uncovering a political business cycle (using Canadian data for 130 years) and by taking up the challenge to make this fact meaningful by finding a transmission mechanism through actual public choices. Since the cycle is in real growth, and it is reasonable to suppose that public expenditure would be involved, the central task then is to investigate the role of (partisan and opportunistic) political factors, as opposed to economic fundamentals, in the evolution of government size. We proceed by asking whether the data allow us to distinguish between the convergence and the nonconvergence hypotheses. Convergence means that political competition forces public spending to converge in the long run to a level dictated by endowments, tastes and technology. Nonconvergence is taken to mean that political factors other than the degree of political competition prevent convergence to that long run. The general idea here, one that may be applied in any situation where the key issue is the role of economics versus politics over time, is that an overtly political factor can be said to play a distinct role in the evolution of public choices if it can be shown to lead to departures from a dynamic path defined by the evolution of economic fundamentals in a competitive political system.

Team Production in Business Organizations: An Introduction

Abstract: For the past two decades, legal and economic scholarship has tended to assume that the central economic problem addressed by corporation law is getting managers and directors to act as faithful agents for shareholders. There are other important economic problems faced by business firms, however. This article introduces a Symposium that explores one of those alternate economic problems: the problem of "team production". Team production problems can arise whenever three conditions are met: (1) economic production requires the combined inputs of two or more individuals; (2) at least some of these inputs are "team-specific," meaning they have a significantly higher value when used in the team than in their next best use; and (3) the gains resulting from team production are nonseparable, making it difficult to attribute any particular portion to any single team member's contribution. In such situations, it can be difficult or impossible for team members to draft explicit contracts that protect their team-specific investments from other team members' opportunism. Thus the nine articles in the Symposium explore the implications of team production analysis for a wide variety of business organizations, including public corporations, private companies, multinational firms, and venture capital firms.