Assignment ECOS3003
Assignment ECOS3003
Choose one of the following questions:
Question A.
You have been approached by the Board of Directors of a company of your choice to
advise it on its organizational architecture.
You must:
1. Select the company (it must be a real for-profit firm).
2. Describe the company’s organizational architecture.
3. Make an assessment of the current architecture. Is the current architecture
appropriate or would you recommend change? If you recommend changes, what
are they? Provide arguments to support your case.
Question B
The University of Sydney has the core objectives of providing quality undergraduate and
postgraduate training as well as being a leading research institutes. The University gets
most of its revenue from teaching, but also receives a significant amount of money for
research (grants, payments for research output by the Federal government, and so on).
In this process, there are many decisions that need to be made: there are choices about
what degrees and subject areas to offer students; how should academics be paid?; how
should research be rewarded?; and so on.
In this question, you need to analyse the organizational architecture of the University of
Sydney. Where appropriate, make recommendations for a change in the current
structure. Provide reasons for your arguments. This report can be written as if you are a
consultant writing a report for the Vice Chancellor.
Question C
Development of new products or services in the bio-tech or high-tech fields invariably
involves a combination of highly specialized skills or techniques from different areas.
This possibly explains why there are so many joint research and development ventures
in the bio-tech and high-tech industries. But joint ventures are not without their own
problems.
Taking a real example of a joint venture, what are the potential benefits and problems
for one (or all) of the participants? Discuss how the joint venture could be set up in such
a way so that still produces the potential benefits but avoids some of the pitfalls inherent
in such projects.
Question D
Taking the Aghion and Tirole (1997) model as a starting point, this question requires you
to develop your own economic model of decision making.
1. First, identify a tradeoff between decentralisation (or delegation) and
centralisation.
2. Develop an economic model that captures these tradeoffs.
3. Solve the model and provide some economic intuition for the results.
ECOS3003 Assignment questions 2
4. Relate the predictions of your model to the current literature on the optimal
allocation of decision-making rights in the literature.
Background reading for Question D
Aghion, P. and J. Tirole 1997, ‘Formal and real authority in organizations’, Journal of
Political Economy, vol. 105, no. 1, pp. 1-29.
M. Colombo and M. Delmastro 2008, The Economics of Organizational Design:
Theoretical Insights and Empirical Evidence, Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire UK,
Chapter 2.
Question E
Make up your own question. If you want to do this, you need to come and discuss it with
me first.
Instructions
Note:
1. You are expected to undertake a reasonable amount of research in completing
this assignment – certainly enough to answer the question. You do not need to
know everything about the company you are studying, but you will need to have
a good idea about at least a few aspects of its architecture. In this assignment,
you will be rewarded for the depth of (relevant) research that you undertake. This
means that you do not have to analyze everything to do with your company –
rather, focus on one or two aspects and analyze them in greater depth. The usual
rules of academic referencing apply.
2. In this assignment, you will also be rewarded for the depth of your analysis using
the tools that you will have been taught in the course.
3. You must back up with evidence or logical reasoning all statements that you
make. Your claims should, where appropriate, be supported by references to the
existing work of experts. Any references used need to detailed in the reference
list at the end of the essay.
4. Given the word count, you will be rewarded from a concise synthesis of the
relevant ideas/evidence/issues.
5. Please submit your assignment double-spaced in 12-point font.
The maximum word limit is 750 words, (excluding your reference list, appendices and
diagrams).
What to submit and when:
Assignments must be submitted electronically via LMS/Blackboard. A hard copy of the
assignment must be handed in the designated assignment drop box in the Merewether
Building. Submission is not valid unless both copies are identical and both received by
the due date. Should submission problems occur, please contact the unit coordinator
immediately