伯格·沃纳菲尔特

伯格·沃纳菲尔特（Birger Wernerfelt）

　　伯格·沃纳菲尔特（Birger Wernerfelt）是哥本哈根大学的哲学学士、经济学硕士，哈佛大学的工商管理博士。曾任A/S CREOLE的副总裁，后到哥本哈根大学、美国密歇根大学、美国西北大学任教。现就职麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院管理科学教授，博士委员会成员。

　　沃纳菲尔特发表管理、经济论文无数。其中，1984年在“企业资源基础理论”中，提出企业是一个资源集合体，企业拥有或者控制的资源影响着企业的竞争优势和收益水平，企业成长战略的实质就是在现有资源运用和新资源培育之间寻求平衡。该文的发表，标志着企业核心竞争力理论的兴起。

　　Birger Wernerfelt is an economist and management theorist. He is the JC Penney Professor of Management and head of the PhD Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

　　A Danish citizen, Wernerfelt has degrees from the University of Copenhagen and Harvard. Prior to coming to MIT in 1989, he was employed by the University of Copenhagen, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. He is married to Harvard Professor Cynthia Montgomery.

　　Wernerfelt is best known for “A Resource-based View of the Firm” (1984), which is one of the most cited papers in the social sciences. Based on the premise that firms are heterogeneous, the article characterizes sustainable differences (resources), suggests that optimal competitive strategies are based on these resources, and describes how current resources can be used to develop new ones.

　　In the last several years, he has been working on implications and foundations of the “Adjustment-cost Theory of the Firm” (1997). The theory portrays the employment relationship as an attempt to exploit economies of scale in bargaining costs: The employer and the employee share the benefits of negotiating a single average price (wage) for a sequence of transactions instead of individual prices for each of them. The wedge in costs allows the parties to sustain an implicit contract with at-will options to fire and quit. The original article proposes that the scope of the firm be defined by the employment relationship.

　　In later works, Wernerfelt has developed the theory to show that the employer should own most of the productive assets, that incentives are weaker inside firms, and that more information is communicated within than between firms.

• “A Resource-based View of the Firm”, Strategic Management Journal 5, no. 2, April-June, pp. 171-80, 1984.
• “Tobin’s q and the Importance of Focus in Firm Performance”, (with Cynthia A. Montgomery), American Economic Review, 78, no. 1, March, pp. 246-50, 1988
• “Diversification, Ricardian Rents, and Tobin’s q”, (with Cynthia A. Montgomery), RAND Journal of Economics, 19, no. 4, Winter, pp. 623-32, 1988
• “Umbrella Branding as a Signal of New Product Quality: An Example of Signalling by Posting a Bond”, RAND Journal of Economics, 19, no. 3, Autumn, pp. 458-66, 1988
• “General Equilibrium with Real Time Search in Labor and Product Markets”, Journal of Political Economy, 96, no. 3, August, pp. 821-31, 1988
• “On the Nature and Scope of the Firm: An Adjustment-Cost Theory”, Journal of Business, 70, no. 4, October, pp. 489-514, 1997
• “Why Should the Boss Own the Assets?”, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 11, no. 3, Fall, pp. 473-85, 2002
• “Determinants of Asset Ownership: A Study of the Carpentry Trade” (with Duncan I. Simester), Review of Economics and Statistics, 87, no. 1, February, pp. 50-58, 2005