Beyond Shareholder Wealth Maximization

Many fields of study are forced to deal with the entity known as the business and assumptions about its nature and goals are often required. Because various fields of study do not have common objectives in their examinations of the firm, these assumptions also vary. The discipline of economics, for example, defines the firm as a profit maximizing entity dealing in perfectly-competitive markets and this definition has remained virtually unchanged for 200 years. While this view may be lacking in descriptive validity, it is deemed adequate for most tasks confronted by economists because this really has nothing to do with the firm; rather, it is a theory of the determination of wages and prices in markets, in which the itself serves the function of a black