规模、利润与企业边界:经济学均衡范式下的企业成长理论

Scale, Profit and Firm Boundary:The Theory of Enterprise Growth under the Economic Equilibrium Paradigm

传统主流经济学没有针对企业成长问题建立专门的理论和模型,但从竞争理论到不确定性理论再到交易费用理论,均研究了影响企业成长的几个重要因素。竞争理论采用规模衡量企业的利润最大化;不确定性理论认为利润是企业成长的重要方面,解释了利润如何从不确定性中产生;交易费用理论研究的企业边界问题说明了企业成长到达的界限,这一界限取决于交易成本的大小。经济学理论选取规模、利润及交易成本这些变量探索企业利润最大化有很强的理论解释力,但把这些变量作为最根本的促动因素解释企业成长还不彻底。这是由经济学均衡的研究范式所决定的。经济学均衡的研究范式关注的是对企业行为两难冲突的折中而非企业成长的动力机制,这是均衡范式下只构建企业的生产模型而非成长模型的根本原因。

The traditional mainstream economics has not established a specific theory and model on the issue of the enterprise growth, but from the theory of competition to the theory of uncertainty and to the transaction cost theory, all of them have studied some important factors affecting the growth of enterprises. The theory of competition uses the variable of scale to measure the profit maximization of an enterprise; the theory of uncertainty regards profit as the important aspect of the growth of an enterprise, which can explain how profit comes from uncertainty; the issue of firm boundary studied by the transaction cost theory can explain the boundary of the growth of an enterprise and this boundary depends on the size of the transaction cost. The economic theories choose such variables as scale, profit and transaction cost to explore the issue of enterprise profit maximization, which has a strong theoretical explanatory power, but it is not sufficient enough to explain the growth of an enterprise simply by using these variables as the fundamental motive causes. This is decided by the research paradigm of economic equilibrium. The research paradigm of economic equilibrium focus on the compromise to dilemma conflicts in business behaviors, not the driving mechanism of the growth of an enterprise; this is the basic reason why under the equilibrium paradigm only the production model is built but not the growth model.