He says,

if I’m Firm A, I’m acquiring control over all the non-human assets that Firm B had, which might be machines, land, buildings, but also less physical things like patents, copyrights, existing contracts that Firm B had with other firms. The name of Firm B, all sorts of things like that.

To the extent that the initial contract was incomplete, and will always be incomplete, whatever contract we write will be incomplete. Having, owning those things now means that I can get to decide how they are used to the extent that the contract was silent about that. Whereas previously, it was the owner, Firm B, that wasn’t me, who had those rights. That’s a real change. That, we would argue, is one of the key reasons that Firm A is acquiring Firm B, to get those residual control rights.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The whole interview is interesting. Hart shared the 2016 Nobel Prize. Of the last 10 years of Nobel Prizes, I could make a case that 6 have been awarded for the study of institutional arrangements.

2007 Hurwicz, Maskin, and Meyerson: mechanism design
2008 Krugman: agglomeration
2009 Ostrom, Williamson: governance
2012 Roth, Shapley: mechanism design
2014 Tirole: industrial organization and regulation
2016 Hart and Holmstrom

That is a notable trend, and I think it is a good one. When you focus on institutional arrangements, there is more of a tendency to say that the economist’s first challenge is to understand how things operate in the real world. A lot of other areas of focus tend to find the economist creating a hammer (a particular mathematical technique, or a model that is fun to work with) and looking around for nails in the real world that may or may not exist.