The multilevel approach to organizational issues of the firm—A critical review

This paper critically reviews the progress and state of multilevel decomposition models for the firm and its management. The presentation introduces and summarizes the fundamental ideas and also gives concise statements concerning advanced developments. The pricing approach, and the budgeting approaches are the two approaches considered. For managerial planning, initial starting solutions, iteration processes, and stopping rules are important algorithmic and organizational considerations. Further, in decentralized organizations, the motivations for cheating in planning, incentives for innovation, and reactions to uncertainty require attention. For these approaches one concludes that further theoretical work designed especially for managerial relevance needs to be developed. Despite these deficiencies, the practitioner need not wait for all the answers as the currently employed methods of pricing and budgeting for planning suffer the same deficiencies, and yet lack the power to choose better plans as the multilevel decomposition approach offers.