Brings together classic and more recent contributions on the nature and organization of firms.

Preface: reintroducing the economic nature of the firm; Part I. Within and among Firms: The Division of Labor: 1. From The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith; 2. From Capital Karl Marx; 3. From Risk, Uncertainty and Profit Frank Knight; 4. From The Modern Corporation and Private Property A. A. Berle and G. C. Means; 5. The use of knowledge in society Friedrich Hayek; 6. Corporate governance Luigi Zingales; Part II. The Nature of the Firm: 7. The nature of the firm Ronald Coase; 8. Vertical integration, appropriable rents, and the competitive contracting process Benjamin Klein, Robert Crawford and Armen Alchian; 9. The governance of contractual relations Oliver Williamson; 10. The limits of firms: incentive and bureaucratic features Oliver Williamson; 11. Bargaining costs, influence costs, and the organization of economic activity Paul Milgrom and John Roberts; 12. The boundaries of the firm revisited Bengt Holmstrom and John Roberts; Part III. The Employment Relation, the Human Factor and Internal Organization: 13. Production, information costs, and economic organization Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz; 14. Contested exchange; new microfoundations for the political economy of capitalism Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis; 15. Understanding the employment relation: the analysis of idiosyncratic exchange Oliver Williamson, Michael Wachter and Jeffrey Harris; 16. Multitask principal-agent analyses: incentive contracts, asset ownership, and job design Bengt Holstrom and Paul Milgrom; 17. Work motivation Truman Bewley; 18. From Worker Participation John Pencavel; Part IV. Finance and the Control of the Firm: 19. Mergers and the market for corporate control Henry Manne; 20. Agency problems and the theory of the firm Eugene Fama; 21. Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs, and ownership structure Michael Jensen and William Meckling; 22. Organizational forms and investment decisions Eugene Fama and Michael Jensen; 23. The rise in managerial stock ownership Clifford G. Holderness, Randall S. Kroszner and Dennis P. Sheehan; 24. Executive compensation as an agency problem Lucian Arye Bebchuk and Jesse M. Fried; 25. An economist's perspective on the theory of the firm Oliver Hart; 26. Ownership and the nature of the firm Louis Putterman.