ABSTRACT
This chapter grew out of the sort of interdisciplinary research that, I believe, Larry Rosenberg had in mind when he developed NSF programs in the area of Coordination. It is not easy for persons in one discipline to share ideas with those in another, and even harder to conduct joint research. But when investigators are stimulated by the goals of a well-run program of research support, then such joint efforts sometimes occur. In this case the disciplines were theoretical Computer Science on the one hand and Economic Theory on the other. The economist (Marschak) was introduced to the relevant Computer Science specialty, namely the theory of Communication Complexity, by Umesh Vazirani, a computer scientist. (Both were receiving support from a multiinvestigator NSF grant). The economist noticed that one could give the Communication Complexity problem an interesting organizational interpretation, in which processors become people. An ancient economic puzzle about decreasing returns to scale in organizations, could be viewed as the question of “subadditivity” in communication complexity. The first result of the collaboration was a joint piece by Marschak and Vazirani (1991) in The Journal of Organizational Computing. The present chapter, in which Marschak pursued the ideas further, was the second result. Whatever its merits, the chapter would not exist without the interdisciplinary stimulus of the NSF program.
