We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In fact, established wisdom claims monopoly power to be instrumental for innovation and sees the non-rivalrous ...

M disclose quality information directly to potential consumers using a variety of communication channels. This study investigates how competition may influence duopoly firms’ incentive to voluntarily reveal quality information. We show that firms in competitive markets reveal less information than a monopoly firm. In addition, sequential disclosure leads to asymmetric equilibrium disclosure beh...

Paul Adler was Program Chair for the 2013 meeting of the Academy of Management in Orlando, Florida, in August. In this capacity, he organized the “All-Academy Theme” component of the meeting program, helped by a committee of Tom Kochan (MIT), Jerry Davis (U. Michigan), Carrie Leana (U. Pittsburgh), and Stella Nkomo (U. Pretoria). The theme was “Capitalism in Question.” The essay below is an edi...

For about ten years, I have carried out annual appraisals on doctors working in general practice. I do this on a freelance basis, not as part of my salaried work. When I started, I used to claim my fees from a man called Steve, in an office at the local primary care trust. Now Steve is no longer there. Nor is his job, nor his office, nor the trust. Nowadays, I send my invoices to an agency a co...

This is a theoretical paper in which we attempt to present an economic and sociological theory of entrepreneurship. We start from Schumpeter’s idea in Theory of Economic Development that the economy can be conceptualized as a combination and innovations as new combinations. Schumpeter also spoke of resistance to entrepreneurship. By linking the ideas of combination and resistance, we are in a p...

An eminent medievalist and one of the most influential of the small band of Marxist historians working in the UK before 1968, Rodney Hilton’s work on the development of the English feudal system into industrial capitalism was, despite its renown, ultimately mistaken. The problems with Hilton’s account were largely inherited from Maurice Dobb, whose interpretation of Marxist theory led him to ex...

It is a disturbing experience for an academic scientist to sit through a press conference given by any biotechnology company which specialises in platform technologies. To be told that yeast can be sequenced in 6 hours or the bacterium of your choice in only 2, makes you feel as if you had to adjust to the news that somebody had jogged up Mount Everest in the same time it normally takes to run ...

Background: Industrial income differential is the most important cause of the public dissatisfaction with the income inequality in China. The high income of monopoly industries is now the typical one of the massive income inequity phenomena. But objectively speaking, not all high income of monopoly industries is unreasonable. The income differential caused by employees’ education level is reaso...

Switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. It is also well known that asymmetric size of customer bases makes monopoly pricing more difficult. Adding consumer heterogeneity to the model we demonstrate that also composition of each firm’s customer base aff...