MANAGERIAL INFORMATION PROCESSING AND THE SPECIFICITY OF INFORMATION

This paper addresses two questions: What information should a manager acquire personally and when should the manager delegate the acquisition of information to subordinates? Among the many potential sources of information in the environment which s,ources should a manager monitor on a regular basis and which ones should he/she access only in response to a need for specific information? Borrowing the notion of asset specificity from transaction cost theory, the paper develops the concept of information specificity and argues that the answers to both these questions will depend on the specificity of the information being sought