Diversification involves ongoing decisions about firm boundaries and relatedness. We develop a theoretical model that uses a real-option framework combined with optimal mechanism design to analyze how choices of boundaries and relatedness affect firm performance in the face of tradeoffs between governance and flexibility. We find that: (1) optimal boundaries and relatedness are substitutes in determining firm performance; (2) the association between relatedness, the most commonly studied aspect of diversification, and firm performance is indeterminate; (3) the substitution between relatedness and boundaries declines as noise in internal communication increases; (4) variation in relatedness has greater impact than boundary size when headquarters can pick multiple winners; and (5) as the internal market for information becomes more efficient, the lower the value of relatedness in combination with small boundaries. The general conceptual implication of these points is that corporate governance interacts with firm relatedness and boundaries in generating diversification performance.

多元化涉及企业边界和关联性的持续决策。我们开发了一种理论模型，该模型使用实物期权框架与最佳机制设计相结合，以分析面对治理与灵活性之间的权衡时，边界和关联性的选择如何影响公司绩效。我们发现：（1）最佳边界和关联性是确定公司绩效的替代方法；（2）关联性（多元化最常研究的方面）与企业绩效之间的关联是不确定的；（3）随着内部沟通中噪声的增加，相关性和边界之间的替代性下降；（4）当总部可以挑选多个获胜者时，关联性的变化比边界大小具有更大的影响；（5）随着内部信息市场变得更加高效，关联性值越小，边界越小。这些观点的总体概念含义是，公司治理在产生多元化绩效时与公司的关联性和边界相互作用。