Alternative Objectives of Business Firms
The traditional theory does not distinguish between owners and managers’ interests. The recent theories of firm, which are also called managerial and behavioral theories of firm, assume owners and managers to be separate entities in large corporations with different goals and motivation. In this section, some important alternative objectives of business firms, especially of large business corporations are also discussed. 1. Baumol’s Hypothesis of Sales Revenue Maximization According to Baumol, “maximization of sales revenue is an alternative to profit maximization objective“. The reason behind this objective is to clearly distinct ownership and management in large business firms. This distinction helps the managers to set their goals other than profit maximization goal. Under this situation, managers maximize their own utility function. According to Baumol, the most reasonable factor in managers utility functions is maximization of the sales revenue. The factors, which help in explaining these goals by the managers, are following: Salary and other earnings of managers are more closely related to seals revenue than to Continue reading