“X-Efficiency,” M. Perelman (2011)

Do people still read Leibenstein’s fascinating 1966 article “Allocative Efficiency vs. X-Efficiency”? They certainly did at one time: Perelman notes that in the 1970s, this article was the third-most cited paper in all of the social sciences! Leibenstein essentially made two points. First, as Harberger had previously shown, distortions like monopoly simply as a matter of mathematics can’t have large welfare impacts. Take monopoly. for instance. The deadweight loss is simply the change in price times the change in quantity supplied times .5 times the percentage of the economy run by monopolist firms. Under reasonable looking demand curves, those deadweight triangles are rarely going to be even ten percent of the total social welfare created in a given industry. If, say, twenty percent of the final goods economy is run by monopolists, then, we only get a two percent change in welfare (and this can be extended to intermediate goods with little empirical change in the final result). Why, then, worry about monopoly?

The reason to worry is Leibenstein’s second point: firms in the same industry often have enormous differences in productivity, and there is tons of empirical evidence that firms do a better job of minimizing costs when under the selection pressures of competition (Schmitz’ 2005 JPE on iron ore producers provides a fantastic demonstration of this). Hence, “X-inefficiency”, which Perelman notes is named after Tolstoy’s “X-factor” in the performance of armies from War and Peace, and not just just allocative efficiency may be important. Draw a simple supply-demand graph and you will immediately see that big “X-inefficiency rectangles” can swamp little Harberger deadweight loss triangles in their welfare implications. So far, so good. These claims, however, turned out to be incredibly controversial.

The problem is that just claiming waste is really a broad attack on a fundamental premise of economics, profit maximization. Stigler, in his well-named X-istence of X-efficiency (gated pdf), argues that we need to be really careful here. Essentially, he is suggesting that information differences, principal-agent contracting problems, and many other factors can explain dispersion in costs, and that we ought focus on those factors before blaming some nebulous concept called waste. And of course he’s correct. But this immediately suggests a shift from traditional price theory to a mechanism design based view of competition, where manager and worker incentives interact with market structure to produce outcomes. I would suggest that this project is still incomplete, that the firm is still too much of a black box in our basic models, and that this leads to a lot of misleading intuition.

For instance, most economists will agree that perfectly price discriminating monopolists have the same welfare impact as perfect competition. But this intuition is solely based on black box firms without any investigation of how those two market structures affect the incentive for managers to collect costly information of efficiency improvements, on the optimal labor contracts under the two scenarios, etc. “Laziness” of workers is an equilibrium outcome of worker contracts, management monitoring, and worker disutility of effort. Just calling that “waste” as Leibenstein does is not terribly effective analysis. It strikes me, though, that Leibenstein is correct when he implicitly suggests that selection in the marketplace is more primitive than profit maximization: I don’t need to know much about how manager and worker incentives work to understand that more competition means inefficient firms are more likely to go out of business. Even in perfect competition, we need to be careful about assuming that selection automatically selects away bad firms: it is not at all obvious that the efficient firms can expand efficiently to steal business from the less efficient, as Chad Syverson has rigorously discussed.

So I’m with Perelman. Yes, Leibenstein’s evidence for X-inefficiency was weak, and yes, he conflates many constraints with pure waste. But on the basic points – that minimized costs depend on the interaction of incentives with market structure instead of simply on technology, and that heterogeneity in measured firm productivity is critical to economic analysis – Leibenstein is far more convincing that his critics. And while Syverson, Bloom, Griffith, van Reenen and many others are opening up the firm empirically to investigate the issues Leibenstein raised, there is still great scope for us theorists to more carefully integrate price theory and mechanism problems.

Final article in JEP 2011 (RePEc IDEAS). As always, a big thumbs up to the JEP for making all of their articles ungated and free to read.