Chaddad and Cook analyze these emerging models by describing various
organizational attributes including ownership structure, membership policy, voting rights,
governance structures, residual claim rights, distribution of benefits and the strategy-structure
interface. Building upon property rights and incomplete contracts theories of the firm, the
authors adopt a broad definition of ownership rights that encompasses both residual claim and
control rights. They argue that alternative cooperative models differ in the way ownership rights
are defined and assigned to the economic agents tied contractually to the firm – in particular,
members, patrons, and investors. Based on multiple examples, they propose a typology of
discrete organizational models, in which the traditional cooperative structure and the investororiented
firm (IOF) are characterized as polar forms