A new approach to explaining the existence of firms and markets, focusing on variability and coordination. It stands in contrast to the emphasis on transaction costs, and on monitoring and incentive structures, which are prominent in most of the modern literature in this field. This approach, called the variability approach, allows us to: show why both the need for communication and the coordination costs increase when the division of labor increases; explain why, while the firm relies on direction, the market does not; rigorously formulate the optimum divisionalization...

A model is an idealization. It is an abstract representation of a given perceived reality. To construct a model one abstracts from the unimportant features of that reality and replaces it by a formal structure, whose properties, explicitly assumed or logically de ducible from the stated assumptions, correspond to the interesting relationships of the reality being studied. The purpose of constructing a model is twofold: first, to help better understand a complex reality; second, to help make pre dictions with regard to still unobserved phenomena. The first purpose will be satisfied if the...