Rejoinder to The motivation of business leaders in socialist and marketbased systems by Péter Mihályi

This rejoinder has the following two aims. First, Mihályi’s analysis is further developed and shown that, in spite of the common motivation across the two economic systems, the behaviour of business leaders can lead to divergent results. Namely, certain managerial decisions can create a disequilibrium mechanism leading to recessions. Second, the current state of macroeconomics is commented upon. Listing the recent financial crisis, dot-com bubble, and the Maxwell collapse in the early 1990s, Mihályi (2017) indicated that corporate governance, i.e. the process of managing multinational companies is a recurring topic after each major collapse. In “The motivation of business leaders in socialist and market-based systems”, Mihályi (2017, p. 12) put forth the argument according to which “the motivation of business leaders in present-day market economies is in many ways similar to the top managers of state owned enterprises (SOEs) under socialism. Despite the common motivation indicated also by Kornai (1971), who highlighted that “educated humans in the modern world function similarly under all circumstances” cited in The motivation of business leaders in socialist and market-based systems (Mihályi, 2017, p. 12), managers’ actions can be followed by very different results due to the divergent situational settings. Mihalyi (2017, p. 4) listed the following six differences between state-owned enterprises and corporations: (1) dependency/separation of companies, (2) the degree of liability of owners, (3) the power of stakeholders, (4) the undertaking of strategic decisions, (5) constant/revocable investment and (6) the role of companies’ names. In state-owned enterprises, the level of responsibility is