过年手抄报内容THE NATURE OF MAN
Michael C. Jenn
Harvard Business School
mjenn@hbs.edu
and
William H. Meckling
University of Rochester
Abstract
Understanding human behavior is fundamental to understanding how organizations
function, whether they are profit-making firms, non-profit enterpris, or government
agencies. Much disagreement among managers, scientists, policy makers, and citizens
aris from substantial differences in the way we think about human nature—about their
strengths, frailties, intelligence, ignorance, honesty, lfishness, and generosity. In this
羊奶粉排行榜10
paper we discuss five alternative models of human behavior that are commonly ud
(though usually implicitly). They are the Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing Model
感恩节手抄报内容(REMM), Economic (or Money Maximizing) Model, Psychological (or Hierarchy of党员的权利义务
Needs) Model, Sociological (or Social Victim) Model, and the Political (or Perfect
Agent) Model. We argue that REMM best describes the systematically rational part of
human behavior. It rves as the foundation for the agency model of financial,
organizational, and governance structure of firms.
The growing body of social science rearch on human behavior has a common message:
Whether they are politicians, managers, academics, professionals, philanthropists, or
factory workers, individuals are resourceful, evaluative maximizers. They respond
creatively to the opportunities the environment prents, and they work to loon
constraints that prevent them from doing what they wish. They care about not only
money, but about almost everything—respect, honor, power, love, and the welfare of
others. The challenge for our society, and for all organizations in it, is to establish rules of
the game that tap and direct human energy in ways that increa rather than reduce the
effective u of our scarce resources.
股骨解剖© M. C. Jenn and W. H. Meckling, 1994. All rights rerved.
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Summer 1994, V. 7, No. 2, pp. 4 - 19.
also published in
Michael C. Jenn, Foundations of Organizational Strategy, Harvard University Press, 1998.
You may redistribute this document freely, but plea do not post the electronic file on the web. I welcome web links to this document at /abstract=5471. I revi my papers regularly, and providing a link to the original ensures that readers will receive the most recent
version. Thank you, Michael C. Jenn
THE NATURE OF MAN*
Michael C. Jenn排球的英语
Harvard Business School
有组织的英语
mjenn@hbs.edu
and
William H. Meckling
University of Rochester
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Summer 1994, V. 7, No. 2, pp. 4 - 19.
also published in
Michael C. Jenn, Foundations of Organizational Strategy, Harvard University Press, 1998.
Understanding human behavior is fundamental to understanding how organizations function, whether they be profit-making firms in the private ctor, non-profit enterpris, or government agencies intended to rve the “public interest.” Much policy disagreement among managers, scientists, policy makers, and citizens aris from substantial, though usually implicit, differences in the way we think about human nature—about the strengths, frailties, intelligence, ignorance, honesty, lfishness, generosity, and altruism of individuals.
*We u the word “man” here in its u as a non-gender-specific reference to human beings. We have attempted to make the language less gender-specific becau the models being discusd describe the behavior of both xes. We have been unable to find a genderless term for u in the title which has the same desired impact.
The first draft of this paper was written in the early 1970s. Since then it has been ud annually in our cour on Coordination and Control and the Management of Organizations at both Rochester and Harvard. We are indebted to our students for much help in honing the ideas over the years. A
n earlier version of some of the ideas in this paper were published previously in William H. Meckling, “Values and the Choice of the Model of the Individual in the Social Sciences,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Volkswirtshaft und Statistik Revue Suis d’Economie Politique et de Statistique (December 1976).
This rearch has been supported by the Managerial Economics Rearch Center, University of Rochester, and the Division of Rearch, Harvard Business School. We are grateful for the advice and comments of many people, including Chris Argyris, George Baker, Fischer Black, Donald Chew, Perry Fagan, Donna Feinberg, Amy Hart, Karin Monsler, Kevin Murphy, Natalie Jenn, Steve-Anna Stephens, Richard Tedlow, Robin Tish, Karen Wruck and Abraham Zaleznik.
The ufulness of any model of human nature depends on its ability to explain a wide range of social phenomena; the test of such a model is the degree to which it is consistent with obrved human behavior. A model that explains behavior only in one small geographical area, or only for a short period in history, or only for people engaged in certain pursuits, is not very uful. For this reason we must u a limited number of general traits to characterize human behavior. Greater detail limits the explanatory ability of a model becau individual people differ so greatly. We want a t of characteristics that captures the esnce of human nature, but no more.
While this may sound abstract and complex, it is neither. Each of us has in mind and us models of human nature every day. We all understand, for example, that people are willing to make tradeoffs among things that they want. Our spous, partners, children, friends, business associates, or perfect strangers, can be induced to make substitutions of all kinds. We offer to go out to dinner Saturday night instead of to the concert tonight. We offer to substitute a bicycle for a stereo as a birthday gift. We allow an employee to go home early today if the time is made up next week.
If our model specified that individuals were never willing to substitute some amount of one good for some amounts of other goods, it would quickly run aground on inconsistent evidence. It could not explain much of the human behavior we obrve. While it may sound silly to characterize individuals as unwilling to make substitutions, that view of human behavior is not far from models that are widely accepted and ud by many social scientists (for example, Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs and sociologists’ models portraying individuals as cultural role players or social victims).
We investigate five alternative models of human behavior that are ud frequently enough, though usually implicitly, in the social science literature and in public discussion to merit attention. For convenience we label the models as follows:
•The Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing Model (REMM)
•The Economic Model (or Money Maximizing Model)
•The Sociological Model (or Social Victim Model)
•The Psychological Model (or Hierarchy of Needs Model)
•The Political Model (or Perfect Agent Model)
The alternative models are pure types characterized in terms of only the barest esntials. We are nsitive to the dangers of creating straw men and concede that our characterization of the models fails to reprent the complexity of the views of scientists in each of the fields. In particular the models do not describe what all individual economists, sociologists, psychologists, etc., u as their model of human behavior. Nevertheless, we believe that enough u is made of such admittedly reductive concepts throughout the social sciences, and by people in general, to warrant our treatment of them in the pages.
1. Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing Model: REMM
雷锋名人名言
The first model is REMM: the Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing Model. While the term is new, the concept is not. REMM is the product of over 200 years of rearch and debate in economics, the oth
er social sciences, and philosophy. As a result, REMM is now defined in very preci terms, but we offer here only a bare bones summary of the concept. Many specifics can be added to enrich its descriptive content without sacrificing the basic foundation we provide here.
Postulate I. Every individual cares; he or she is an evaluator.
(a) The individual cares about almost everything: knowledge, independence, the plight of others, the environment, honor, interpersonal relationships, status, peer approval, group norms, culture, wealth, rules of conduct, the weather, music, art, and so on.
(b) REMM is always willing to make trade-offs and substitutions. Each individual is always willing to give up some sufficiently small amount of any particular good (oranges, water, air, housing, honesty, or safety) for some sufficiently large quantity of other goods. Furthermore, valuation is relative in the n that the value of a unit of any particular good decreas as the individual enjoys more of it relative to other goods.
(c) Individual preferences are transitive—that is, if A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C.
Postulate II. Each individual’s wants are unlimited.
(a) If we designate tho things that REMM values positively as “goods,” then he or she prefers more goods to less. Goods can be anything from art objects to ethical norms.
(b) REMM cannot be satiated. He or she always wants more of some things, be they material goods such as art, sculpture, castles, and pyramids; or non-material goods such as solitude, companionship, honesty, respect, love, fame, and immortality.
Postulate III. Each individual is a maximizer.
He or she acts so as to enjoy the highest level of value possible. Individuals are always constrained in satisfying their wants. Wealth, time, and the physical laws of nature are examples of important constraints that affect the opportunities available to any individual. Individuals are also constrained by the limits of their own knowledge about various goods and opportunities; their choices of goods or cours of action will reflect the costs of acquiring the knowledge or information necessary to evaluate tho choices.1 The notion of an opportunity t provides the limit on the level of value attainable by any individual. The opportunity t is usually regarded as something that is given and
1When one takes into account information costs, much behavior that appears to be suboptimal “satisficing” can be explained as attempts to maximize subject to such costs. Unfortunately, satisfici
ng (a much misud term originated by Herbert A. Simon (1955)) does not suggest this interpretation.
external to the individual. Economists usually reprent it as a wealth or income constraint and a t of prices at which the individual can buy goods. But the notion of an individual’s opportunity t can be generalized to include the t of activities he or she can perform during a 24-hour day—or in a lifetime.
Postulate IV. The individual is resourceful.
Individuals are creative. They are able to conceive of changes in their environment, foree the conquences thereof, and respond by creating new opportunities.
Although an individual’s opportunity t is limited at any instant in time by his or her knowledge and the state of the world, that limitation is not immutable. Human beings are not only capable of learning about new opportunities, they also engage in resourceful, creative activities that expand their opportunities in various ways.
The kind of highly mechanical behavior posited by economists—that is, assigning probabilities and e
xpected values to various actions and choosing the action with the highest expected value—is formally consistent with the evaluating, maximizing model defined in Postulates I through III. But such behavior falls short of the human capabilities posited by REMM; it says nothing about the individual’s ingenuity and creativity.
2. REMMs At Work
One way of capturing the notion of resourcefulness is to think about the effects of newly impod constraints on human behavior. The constraints might be new operating policies in a corporation or new laws impod by governments. No matter how much experience we have with the respon of people to changes in their environment, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new law or policy intended to constrain human behavior. Moreover, the constraint or law will almost always generate behavior which was never
