Richard Langlois - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Richard Langlois

Research paper thumbnail of The changing tide: Federal support of civilian-sector R and D

This summary of the nature of industrial research can be made more complete for the purposes of t... more This summary of the nature of industrial research can be made more complete for the purposes of this study by adding a few comments about specific operating characteristics. The most important feature is that each industry iz unique with regard to such factors as: * Whether competition is atomistic or rivalrous; '* The sizes and size-distribution of firms; * The ease of entry for new firms; * The R&D policies of the firms; * . The nature of the customers and their innovative ' : " behavior; * The proprietary characteristics of the knowledge produced by R&D in the industry; and * The nature and extent of government regulation. There are others. What comes through sharply in this list is that the reaction of industry to an,y federal effort in R&D will be different for each industry -indeed for each company.

Research paper thumbnail of Knowledge, Consumption, and Endogenous Growth

Social Science Research Network, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Computers and Semiconductors

Princeton University Press eBooks, Jul 13, 2021

ABSTRACT At the end of the twentieth century, it became common to talk ofthdigital revolution,&am... more ABSTRACT At the end of the twentieth century, it became common to talk ofthdigital revolution,'' a historical phenomenon worthy of its place among the various industrial revolutions of the previous two centuries. Underlying the digi-tal revolution is the technology of the semicon-ductor, a device that emerged at the century's half-way point. Although the digital revolution rami®es itself throughout the modern world, notably into telecommunications and consu-mer goods, its most signal embodiment is the digital computer, a technology born at almost exactly the same point in history. Figure 10.1 suggests why the progress of digi-tal technology appears so revolutionary. One very broad measure of the power of a computer is the number of so-called ¯oating-point opera-tions (like adding together two numbers) a machine can perform in a second. The ®rst truly digital computer, the ENIAC of 1946, cost some U.S.$750,000 to produce±-something like U.S.$6,265,000 in 1998 dollars±-and could perform 5,000 calculations per second. The circa 1998 Pentium II computer on which I am writing this chapter cost about U.S.$1,500 and can perform 200 million calculations per second. That is about U.S.$1.25 billion per million ¯oating-point operations per second (MFLOPS) for the ENIAC±-and about U.S.$8 per MFLOPS for the Pentium II. This phenom-enal decline is tied to the rapid improvement of the semiconductor technology on which computers now depend. 1 Using broad strokes, this chapter sketches the intertwined history of these two industries±-semiconductors and computers. In so doing, it attempts to shed light on the sources of techno-logical change in these industries and on the complex mechanisms through which that tech-nological change has translated into economic growth. A distinctive theme in this history will be the emergence and signi®cance of general-purpose technologies (GPTs). Such technologies (and their attendant systems of skill and knowledge) typically develop in response to speci®c techno-logical puzzles or bottlenecks, but they ulti-mately generate principles and techniques that are applicable to a wide variety of otherwise distinct output sectors of the economy (Bresna-han and Trajtenberg, 1995; Bresnahan and Gambardella, 1998). Nathan Rosenberg (1963) described this process as technological convergence. Because what is learned once can be reused many times, technological conver-gence generates the something-for-nothing effect economists call increasing returns, a phenomenon at the heart of economic growth. 2 1 Data in this paragraph and in Figure 10.1 are from Kurz-weil (1999: 320±1).

Research paper thumbnail of Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism

The discovery of the corporation. In the early 1930s, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means made an inte... more The discovery of the corporation. In the early 1930s, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means made an interesting discovery. While no one was looking, the American economy had ceased to be driven by small, owneroperated businesses, but had come to be dominated by the large corporation 1 (Berle and Means 1932). Alarmingly, they noticed, corporations were coming increasingly to be managed by salaried professionals rather than by their equity owners. From this Berle and Means concluded that one could no longer count on markets to discipline corporations and that one could expect managers to "plunder" stockholders for personal gain. Here at once were fanned the two great populist fears about the corporation: concentrated power and the separation of ownership from control. Berle and Means were long on seemingly ominous statistics but short on analysis of the corporation as an institution. What was its rationale, its logic, its dynamic? What was its role in the economic process? Neoclassical economic doctrines were not much help. Like Berle and Means, they started from the assumption of small owner-managed firms as a normative standard, and thus what light they could shed revealed the same dark possibilities of concentration and plunder. 2 On the whole, indeed, the Depression decade of the 'thirties was an ideological low-point for the large corporation, an institution never blessed in any era with favorable press. But the corporation was not entirely without its defenders. Perhaps the most important was Joseph Schumpeter, Harvard economist by way of Vienna, whose Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy appeared a decade after Berle and Means. If one takes the trouble to look at economic history, Schumpeter observed, one cannot conclude that the development 23 Roberts and Stephenson (1973, p. 25n) point out that the term "organization of labor," in Marx and Engels, and in contemporary socialist writing generally, referred to complete central planning.

Research paper thumbnail of Antitrust: Where Did It Come from and What Did It Mean?

Social Science Research Network, 2016

This paper is a draft chapter from an ongoing book project I am calling The Corporation and the T... more This paper is a draft chapter from an ongoing book project I am calling The Corporation and the Twentieth Century. In The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler explained the rise of the large vertically integrated corporation in the United States mostly in terms of forces of technology and economic geography. Institutions, including government policy, played a quite minor role. In my own attempt to explain the decline of the vertically integrated form in the late twentieth century, I stayed true to Chandler's largely institution-free approach. This book will be an exercise in bringing institutions back in. It will argue that institutions, notably various forms of non-market controls imposed by the federal government, are a critical piece of the explanation of the rise and decline of the multi-unit enterprise in the U. S. Indeed, non-market controls, including those imposed in response to the dramatic events of the century, account in significant measure for the dominance of the Chandlerian corporation in the middle of the twentieth century. One important form of non-market controlthough by no means the only formhas been antitrust policy. This chapter traces the history of antitrust and argues that, far from being a coherent attempt to address an actual economic problem of monopoly, the Sherman Antitrust Act emerged from the distributional political economy of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the chapter argues that the form in which antitrust emerged would prove significant for the corporation, as the Sherman Act and its successors outlawed virtually all types of inter-firm coordinating mechanisms, thus effectively evacuating the space between anonymous market transactions and full integration.

Research paper thumbnail of Knowledge and Rationality in the Austrian School: an Analytical Survey

Eastern Economic Journal, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Modularity in Technology, Organization, and Society

Social Science Research Network, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Managing in the modular age : architectures, networks, and organizations

Blackwell eBooks, 2002

Acknowledgments. Introduction: Managing in The Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizat... more Acknowledgments. Introduction: Managing in The Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizations. (R. Garud, A. Kumaraswamy, R. Langlois). Part I: Overview. 1. The Architecture of Complexity. (H. A. Simon). Commentary. (M. Augier and H. A. Simon). 2. Technological and Organizational Designs to Achieve Economies of Substitution. (R. Garud and A. Kumaraswamy). Commentary. 3. Networks And Innovation In A Modular System: Lessons From The Microcomputer And Stereo Component Industries. (R. N. Langlois and P. L. Robertson). Commentary. Part II: Modularity And Architectures. 4. The Role of Product Architecture in the Manufacturing Firm. (K. Ulrich). Commentary. 5. Managing in an Age of Modularity. (C. Y. Baldwin and K. B. Clark). Commentary. 6. Towards a General Modular Systems Theory and Its Application to Interfirm Product Modularity. (M. A. Schilling). Commentary. Part III: Networks And Standards. 7. The Economics of Networks. (N. Economides). Commentary. 8. The Art of Standards Wars. (C. Shapiro and H. R. Varian). Commentary. Part IV: Field--Level And Organizational Dynamics. 9. Dynamics of Organizational Communities and Technological Bandwagons: An Empirical Investigation of Community Evolution in the Microprocessor Market. (J. Wade). Commentary. 10. Dominant Designs, Technological Cycles and Organizational Outcomes. (M. L. Tushman and J. P. Murmann). Commentary. (G. Westerman and M. L. Tushman). 11. Modularity, Flexibility and Knowledge Management in Product and Organizational Design. (R. Sanchez and J. T. Mahoney). Commentary. (R. Sanchez). Index.

Research paper thumbnail of The Secret Life of Mundane Transaction Costs

Organization Studies, Jun 28, 2006

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. ... more Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work. Interestingly, however, the present-day economics of organization also ignores friction. That is, almost single-mindedly, the literature analyzes transactions from the point of view of misaligned incentives and (especially) transaction-specific assets. The costs involved are certainly costs of running the economic system in some sense, but they are not obviously frictions. Stories about frictions in trade are not nearly as intriguing as stories about guileful trading partners and expensive assets placed at risk. But I will argue that these seemingly dull categories of cost what Baldwin and Clark (2003) call mundane transaction costs actually have a secret life. They are at least as important as, and quite probably far more important than, the more glamorous costs of asset specificity in explaining the partition between firm and market. These costs also have a secret life in another sense: they have a secret life cycle. I will argue that these mundane transaction costs provide much better material for helping us understanding how the boundaries among firms, markets, and hybrid forms change over time.

Research paper thumbnail of The rise of the corporation

Routledge eBooks, Apr 18, 2007

Research paper thumbnail of Understanding R&D productivity

Pergamon Press eBooks, 1982

Research paper thumbnail of Fission, forking and fine tuning

Journal of Institutional Economics, Sep 19, 2017

Perhaps because we live in the age of the Internet and social networks, everyone seems agreed tha... more Perhaps because we live in the age of the Internet and social networks, everyone seems agreed that innovation is all about recombination. Although not fully dissenting from this consensus, and perhaps in the end affirming it in an important way, I want to draw attention to some apparently different mechanisms of innovation, both suggested by Adam Smith: subdivision (or differentiation) and fine-tuning. On the surface at least, theseespecially the seconddo not appear to be processes of recombination. I will attempt to elucidate what I mean by these concepts and try to think about how they fit together with recombination in a full Smithian account of innovation. Whether innovation proceeds from the top down or the bottom up depends crucially on the structure of complementary stages in the process of production. Especially if it takes place in a non-modular way, recombination may require unified decision rights, implying the vertical integration of complementary stages of production, in order to overcome the dynamic transaction costs of change. But the processes of subdivision and differentiation may also require changes in decision rights in order to overcome dynamic transaction costs. I illustrate these points with a case study of three generations of an American family of inventor-entrepreneurs in electricity and electronics.

Research paper thumbnail of The institutional approach to economic history: Connecting the two strands

Journal of Comparative Economics, Feb 1, 2017

This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in historythe scattering of plots in the o... more This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in historythe scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolutionto shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these episodes, economic "just-so" stories advanced our understanding of history. What animated intellectual innovation in both cases was a bold conjecture about the raison d'être of a puzzling institutional structure. But what ultimately enriched our understanding was the process of conjecture and revision those conjectures set off. In both episodes, the revised conjectures that best withstood criticism and revision were those that saw the phenomena not as static snapshots of economic agents confronting an economic problem but rather those that embedded the phenomena within a larger economic problem and within a process of economic change. In the end it is an account of institutional changewhat I call the good old New Institutional Economicsthat connects the use of institutional economics to explain puzzling historical phenomenon with the role of institutional economics in addressing the big questions of economic growth.

Research paper thumbnail of Risk and uncertainty

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 1994

Research paper thumbnail of Cognition, Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 1997

Research paper thumbnail of Micro-Electronics: An Industry in Transition

Research paper thumbnail of The Austrian theory of the firm: Retrospect and prospect

The Review of Austrian Economics, Feb 9, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Standards, Modularity, and Innovation: the Case of Medical Practice

Social Science Research Network, 1998

The economics of standards and standard setting has grown to considerable prominence in the last ... more The economics of standards and standard setting has grown to considerable prominence in the last few years. 1 Buttressed by influential neoclassical models of network externalities (Farrell & Saloner, 1985; Katz & Shapiro, 1985), this intellectual edifice has as its keystone David's (1985) famous history of the QWERTY keyboard. In David's account, the now-familiar arrangement of keys is a paradigmatic instance of path dependency. The choice of the QWERTY design was essentially a matter of historical accident; and, once that arrangement became dominant, the spiraling benefits of its network of complementary capabilities-notably touch-typing skills-effectively "locked" users into the QWERTY standard. This chapter takes up the issue of standard setting both in theory and in terms of a historical case study, namely, the setting of standards for the American medical profession in the early 20th century. As a contribution to the literature on standards and path dependency, however, this chapter diverges somewhat from the beaten path. First of all, our case involves behav-1. For an overview, see David and Greenstein (1990).

Research paper thumbnail of What Is Evolutionary Economics?

Springer eBooks, Nov 22, 2007

All evolution is concerned with the growth of knowledge, a proposition no less true in economic s... more All evolution is concerned with the growth of knowledge, a proposition no less true in economic systems (and society in general) than in biological ones. As the philosopher Elliott Sober (1984) notes, evolutionary theory is a theory of forces, that is, a theory of the causes of change, of the processes that produce a certain sequence of events and entities.

Research paper thumbnail of Economic Change and the Boundaries of the Firm

Studies in industrial organization, 1989

Research paper thumbnail of The changing tide: Federal support of civilian-sector R and D

This summary of the nature of industrial research can be made more complete for the purposes of t... more This summary of the nature of industrial research can be made more complete for the purposes of this study by adding a few comments about specific operating characteristics. The most important feature is that each industry iz unique with regard to such factors as: * Whether competition is atomistic or rivalrous; '* The sizes and size-distribution of firms; * The ease of entry for new firms; * The R&D policies of the firms; * . The nature of the customers and their innovative ' : " behavior; * The proprietary characteristics of the knowledge produced by R&D in the industry; and * The nature and extent of government regulation. There are others. What comes through sharply in this list is that the reaction of industry to an,y federal effort in R&D will be different for each industry -indeed for each company.

Research paper thumbnail of Knowledge, Consumption, and Endogenous Growth

Social Science Research Network, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Computers and Semiconductors

Princeton University Press eBooks, Jul 13, 2021

ABSTRACT At the end of the twentieth century, it became common to talk ofthdigital revolution,&am... more ABSTRACT At the end of the twentieth century, it became common to talk ofthdigital revolution,'' a historical phenomenon worthy of its place among the various industrial revolutions of the previous two centuries. Underlying the digi-tal revolution is the technology of the semicon-ductor, a device that emerged at the century's half-way point. Although the digital revolution rami®es itself throughout the modern world, notably into telecommunications and consu-mer goods, its most signal embodiment is the digital computer, a technology born at almost exactly the same point in history. Figure 10.1 suggests why the progress of digi-tal technology appears so revolutionary. One very broad measure of the power of a computer is the number of so-called ¯oating-point opera-tions (like adding together two numbers) a machine can perform in a second. The ®rst truly digital computer, the ENIAC of 1946, cost some U.S.$750,000 to produce±-something like U.S.$6,265,000 in 1998 dollars±-and could perform 5,000 calculations per second. The circa 1998 Pentium II computer on which I am writing this chapter cost about U.S.$1,500 and can perform 200 million calculations per second. That is about U.S.$1.25 billion per million ¯oating-point operations per second (MFLOPS) for the ENIAC±-and about U.S.$8 per MFLOPS for the Pentium II. This phenom-enal decline is tied to the rapid improvement of the semiconductor technology on which computers now depend. 1 Using broad strokes, this chapter sketches the intertwined history of these two industries±-semiconductors and computers. In so doing, it attempts to shed light on the sources of techno-logical change in these industries and on the complex mechanisms through which that tech-nological change has translated into economic growth. A distinctive theme in this history will be the emergence and signi®cance of general-purpose technologies (GPTs). Such technologies (and their attendant systems of skill and knowledge) typically develop in response to speci®c techno-logical puzzles or bottlenecks, but they ulti-mately generate principles and techniques that are applicable to a wide variety of otherwise distinct output sectors of the economy (Bresna-han and Trajtenberg, 1995; Bresnahan and Gambardella, 1998). Nathan Rosenberg (1963) described this process as technological convergence. Because what is learned once can be reused many times, technological conver-gence generates the something-for-nothing effect economists call increasing returns, a phenomenon at the heart of economic growth. 2 1 Data in this paragraph and in Figure 10.1 are from Kurz-weil (1999: 320±1).

Research paper thumbnail of Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism

The discovery of the corporation. In the early 1930s, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means made an inte... more The discovery of the corporation. In the early 1930s, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means made an interesting discovery. While no one was looking, the American economy had ceased to be driven by small, owneroperated businesses, but had come to be dominated by the large corporation 1 (Berle and Means 1932). Alarmingly, they noticed, corporations were coming increasingly to be managed by salaried professionals rather than by their equity owners. From this Berle and Means concluded that one could no longer count on markets to discipline corporations and that one could expect managers to "plunder" stockholders for personal gain. Here at once were fanned the two great populist fears about the corporation: concentrated power and the separation of ownership from control. Berle and Means were long on seemingly ominous statistics but short on analysis of the corporation as an institution. What was its rationale, its logic, its dynamic? What was its role in the economic process? Neoclassical economic doctrines were not much help. Like Berle and Means, they started from the assumption of small owner-managed firms as a normative standard, and thus what light they could shed revealed the same dark possibilities of concentration and plunder. 2 On the whole, indeed, the Depression decade of the 'thirties was an ideological low-point for the large corporation, an institution never blessed in any era with favorable press. But the corporation was not entirely without its defenders. Perhaps the most important was Joseph Schumpeter, Harvard economist by way of Vienna, whose Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy appeared a decade after Berle and Means. If one takes the trouble to look at economic history, Schumpeter observed, one cannot conclude that the development 23 Roberts and Stephenson (1973, p. 25n) point out that the term "organization of labor," in Marx and Engels, and in contemporary socialist writing generally, referred to complete central planning.

Research paper thumbnail of Antitrust: Where Did It Come from and What Did It Mean?

Social Science Research Network, 2016

This paper is a draft chapter from an ongoing book project I am calling The Corporation and the T... more This paper is a draft chapter from an ongoing book project I am calling The Corporation and the Twentieth Century. In The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler explained the rise of the large vertically integrated corporation in the United States mostly in terms of forces of technology and economic geography. Institutions, including government policy, played a quite minor role. In my own attempt to explain the decline of the vertically integrated form in the late twentieth century, I stayed true to Chandler's largely institution-free approach. This book will be an exercise in bringing institutions back in. It will argue that institutions, notably various forms of non-market controls imposed by the federal government, are a critical piece of the explanation of the rise and decline of the multi-unit enterprise in the U. S. Indeed, non-market controls, including those imposed in response to the dramatic events of the century, account in significant measure for the dominance of the Chandlerian corporation in the middle of the twentieth century. One important form of non-market controlthough by no means the only formhas been antitrust policy. This chapter traces the history of antitrust and argues that, far from being a coherent attempt to address an actual economic problem of monopoly, the Sherman Antitrust Act emerged from the distributional political economy of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the chapter argues that the form in which antitrust emerged would prove significant for the corporation, as the Sherman Act and its successors outlawed virtually all types of inter-firm coordinating mechanisms, thus effectively evacuating the space between anonymous market transactions and full integration.

Research paper thumbnail of Knowledge and Rationality in the Austrian School: an Analytical Survey

Eastern Economic Journal, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Modularity in Technology, Organization, and Society

Social Science Research Network, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Managing in the modular age : architectures, networks, and organizations

Blackwell eBooks, 2002

Acknowledgments. Introduction: Managing in The Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizat... more Acknowledgments. Introduction: Managing in The Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizations. (R. Garud, A. Kumaraswamy, R. Langlois). Part I: Overview. 1. The Architecture of Complexity. (H. A. Simon). Commentary. (M. Augier and H. A. Simon). 2. Technological and Organizational Designs to Achieve Economies of Substitution. (R. Garud and A. Kumaraswamy). Commentary. 3. Networks And Innovation In A Modular System: Lessons From The Microcomputer And Stereo Component Industries. (R. N. Langlois and P. L. Robertson). Commentary. Part II: Modularity And Architectures. 4. The Role of Product Architecture in the Manufacturing Firm. (K. Ulrich). Commentary. 5. Managing in an Age of Modularity. (C. Y. Baldwin and K. B. Clark). Commentary. 6. Towards a General Modular Systems Theory and Its Application to Interfirm Product Modularity. (M. A. Schilling). Commentary. Part III: Networks And Standards. 7. The Economics of Networks. (N. Economides). Commentary. 8. The Art of Standards Wars. (C. Shapiro and H. R. Varian). Commentary. Part IV: Field--Level And Organizational Dynamics. 9. Dynamics of Organizational Communities and Technological Bandwagons: An Empirical Investigation of Community Evolution in the Microprocessor Market. (J. Wade). Commentary. 10. Dominant Designs, Technological Cycles and Organizational Outcomes. (M. L. Tushman and J. P. Murmann). Commentary. (G. Westerman and M. L. Tushman). 11. Modularity, Flexibility and Knowledge Management in Product and Organizational Design. (R. Sanchez and J. T. Mahoney). Commentary. (R. Sanchez). Index.

Research paper thumbnail of The Secret Life of Mundane Transaction Costs

Organization Studies, Jun 28, 2006

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. ... more Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work. Interestingly, however, the present-day economics of organization also ignores friction. That is, almost single-mindedly, the literature analyzes transactions from the point of view of misaligned incentives and (especially) transaction-specific assets. The costs involved are certainly costs of running the economic system in some sense, but they are not obviously frictions. Stories about frictions in trade are not nearly as intriguing as stories about guileful trading partners and expensive assets placed at risk. But I will argue that these seemingly dull categories of cost what Baldwin and Clark (2003) call mundane transaction costs actually have a secret life. They are at least as important as, and quite probably far more important than, the more glamorous costs of asset specificity in explaining the partition between firm and market. These costs also have a secret life in another sense: they have a secret life cycle. I will argue that these mundane transaction costs provide much better material for helping us understanding how the boundaries among firms, markets, and hybrid forms change over time.

Research paper thumbnail of The rise of the corporation

Routledge eBooks, Apr 18, 2007

Research paper thumbnail of Understanding R&D productivity

Pergamon Press eBooks, 1982

Research paper thumbnail of Fission, forking and fine tuning

Journal of Institutional Economics, Sep 19, 2017

Perhaps because we live in the age of the Internet and social networks, everyone seems agreed tha... more Perhaps because we live in the age of the Internet and social networks, everyone seems agreed that innovation is all about recombination. Although not fully dissenting from this consensus, and perhaps in the end affirming it in an important way, I want to draw attention to some apparently different mechanisms of innovation, both suggested by Adam Smith: subdivision (or differentiation) and fine-tuning. On the surface at least, theseespecially the seconddo not appear to be processes of recombination. I will attempt to elucidate what I mean by these concepts and try to think about how they fit together with recombination in a full Smithian account of innovation. Whether innovation proceeds from the top down or the bottom up depends crucially on the structure of complementary stages in the process of production. Especially if it takes place in a non-modular way, recombination may require unified decision rights, implying the vertical integration of complementary stages of production, in order to overcome the dynamic transaction costs of change. But the processes of subdivision and differentiation may also require changes in decision rights in order to overcome dynamic transaction costs. I illustrate these points with a case study of three generations of an American family of inventor-entrepreneurs in electricity and electronics.

Research paper thumbnail of The institutional approach to economic history: Connecting the two strands

Journal of Comparative Economics, Feb 1, 2017

This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in historythe scattering of plots in the o... more This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in historythe scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolutionto shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these episodes, economic "just-so" stories advanced our understanding of history. What animated intellectual innovation in both cases was a bold conjecture about the raison d'être of a puzzling institutional structure. But what ultimately enriched our understanding was the process of conjecture and revision those conjectures set off. In both episodes, the revised conjectures that best withstood criticism and revision were those that saw the phenomena not as static snapshots of economic agents confronting an economic problem but rather those that embedded the phenomena within a larger economic problem and within a process of economic change. In the end it is an account of institutional changewhat I call the good old New Institutional Economicsthat connects the use of institutional economics to explain puzzling historical phenomenon with the role of institutional economics in addressing the big questions of economic growth.

Research paper thumbnail of Risk and uncertainty

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 1994

Research paper thumbnail of Cognition, Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 1997

Research paper thumbnail of Micro-Electronics: An Industry in Transition

Research paper thumbnail of The Austrian theory of the firm: Retrospect and prospect

The Review of Austrian Economics, Feb 9, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Standards, Modularity, and Innovation: the Case of Medical Practice

Social Science Research Network, 1998

The economics of standards and standard setting has grown to considerable prominence in the last ... more The economics of standards and standard setting has grown to considerable prominence in the last few years. 1 Buttressed by influential neoclassical models of network externalities (Farrell & Saloner, 1985; Katz & Shapiro, 1985), this intellectual edifice has as its keystone David's (1985) famous history of the QWERTY keyboard. In David's account, the now-familiar arrangement of keys is a paradigmatic instance of path dependency. The choice of the QWERTY design was essentially a matter of historical accident; and, once that arrangement became dominant, the spiraling benefits of its network of complementary capabilities-notably touch-typing skills-effectively "locked" users into the QWERTY standard. This chapter takes up the issue of standard setting both in theory and in terms of a historical case study, namely, the setting of standards for the American medical profession in the early 20th century. As a contribution to the literature on standards and path dependency, however, this chapter diverges somewhat from the beaten path. First of all, our case involves behav-1. For an overview, see David and Greenstein (1990).

Research paper thumbnail of What Is Evolutionary Economics?

Springer eBooks, Nov 22, 2007

All evolution is concerned with the growth of knowledge, a proposition no less true in economic s... more All evolution is concerned with the growth of knowledge, a proposition no less true in economic systems (and society in general) than in biological ones. As the philosopher Elliott Sober (1984) notes, evolutionary theory is a theory of forces, that is, a theory of the causes of change, of the processes that produce a certain sequence of events and entities.

Research paper thumbnail of Economic Change and the Boundaries of the Firm

Studies in industrial organization, 1989