Asset specificity is a term related to the inter-party relationships of a transaction. It is usually defined as the extent to which the investments made to support a particular transaction have a higher value to that transaction than they would have if they were redeployed for any other purpose. Asset specificity has been extensively studied in a variety of management and economics areas such as marketing, accounting, organizational behavior and management information systems.
Overview
The concept of asset specificity is closely related to that of opportunism. Classical economists assume the existence of the "perfectly rational economic man". Previous approaches to economics often assumed that two contractually bounded firms will stick to the contract as they are supposed to. However, recent scholars led by Oliver E. Williamson (1975, 1985) stressed the issue of opportunism. A party to a transaction could be opportunistic by producing poor quality goods, delivering products late, or by not following through with provisions of a contract. Another key element of Williamson's scholarship is the idea of "bounded rationality". Bounded rationality is defined as a semistrong form of rationality in which actors are assumed to be intendedly rational, but only to a limited extent. Human beings have limited access to knowledge and a limited ability to process the knowledge we have access to. Therefore, actors will behave rationally, but within the limits of their capacity. Williamson argued that the two most important dimensions of business behavior are the problems of imperfect competition and the propensity to act opportunistically. "Asset specificity" becomes an issue because of opportunism.
Definition
Asset specificity is usually defined as the extent to which the investments made to support a particular transaction have a higher value to that transaction than they would have if they were redeployed for any other purpose (McGuinness 1994). Williamson (1975, 1985, 1986) argued that transaction-specific assets are non-redeployable physical and human investments that are specialized and unique to a task. For example the production of a certain component may require investment in specialized equipment, the distribution of a certain product may necessitate unique physical facilities, or the delivery of a certain service may be predicated on the existence of an uncommon set of professional know-how and skills.
Basically, asset specificity refers to the extent to which a party is "tied in" in a two-way or multiple-way business relationship. For example, learning to speak English, one of the most widely understood languages of the world, is a highly asset-unspecific investment, since your investment will be likely to have equal returns (being able to communicate with others) across a variety of different settings. On the other hand, learning to speak Navajo, a rare Athabaskan language spoken in the southwest United States, could be highly asset-specific (human asset-specific, specifically), since your investment return (being able to communicate with others) is high with the few Navajo-speaking people, but almost zero otherwise.
Originally asset specificity is proposed mainly in a buyer-seller situation, where the buyer is the party that does not hold the specific assets and the seller is the party that holds the specific assets. For example, in Williamson's (1983) model, the hold-up is unilateral: the buyer holds up the seller. However later researchers have realized that asset specificity could be bilateral, or even multi-lateral. For example Joskow (1988) and Klein (1988) noted that even in a traditional buyer-seller situation, the hold up is bilateral because the buyer (the party that does not hold the specific assets) has exit cost associated with time and searching investment if he decides to switch party.
Multidimensionality
Scholars have acknowledged the multidimensional property of asset specificity. For example, Williamson (1983) identified four dimensions of asset specificity:
Site specificity, e.g. a natural resource available at a certain location and movable only at great cost; Physical asset specificity, e.g. a specialized machine tool or complex computer system designed for a single purpose; Human asset specificity, i.e., highly specialized human skills, arising in a learning by doing fashion; and Dedicated assets, i.e. a discrete investment in a plant that cannot readily be put to work for other purposes. Brand Name Capital (Willamson 1987)
Malone et al. (1987) made an important addition to the above list: