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Record W2134068343 · doi:10.1017/s1062798705000761

Ever Bigger Firms?

2005· article· en· W2134068343 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueEuropean Review · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicEconomic Theory and Institutions
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPayrollIncentivePopulationProfitability indexShareholderEconomies of scaleMarket economyEconomicsQuarter (Canadian coin)Scale (ratio)BusinessEconomyCorporate governanceFinanceManagementMarketing

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

When the grandfather of modern economics, Adam Smith, was preparing his Wealth of Nations almost a quarter of a millennium ago, the workforce of businesses would typically be counted in single or double figures. Now the world's biggest firms, such as Wal-Mart, have a payroll of well over a million, bigger than the population of some entire nations. This paper reviews some of the reasons for this growth, and considers whether it might continue forever. Powerful evidence exists of potential scale economies, in business functions from R&D to finance, and industries from pin production to pharmaceuticals. And these do indeed translate into remarkable performance records for some industrial giants. But surprisingly, on average , bigger firms do not enjoy above average profitability and, on the whole, giant firms are not gaining on the world economy. This paper reviews some of the market and managerial constraints on size, and considers innovative efforts – ranging from the New Zealand dairy industry to the McDonald's chain – to reconcile global-level scale economies in some functions with local autonomy in others. In passing, the paper notes a disturbing array of incentives tempting some managers to expand their empire, even when that is not in the shareholders' interest.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.921
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.085

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.046
GPT teacher head0.231
Teacher spread0.185 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it