1. Research subject and objectives This study focuses on an economic institution, the large industrial holding company, which continues to hold a prominent if not a strategic position in the resource allocation process in many industrialised market economies. Powerful multicompany combines like the famous Japanese zaibatsu and the less familiar but equally powerful European industrial groups rely on the institution of the holding company to tie their intermarket control network together. Two general questions arise from this situation: first, what factors account for the viability and growth within a market setting of those institutions which internalise allocation decisions and, second, what effect do such institutions have on resource allocation? These questions provide the framework in