Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Theory of the entrepreneurial firm
- 2 Who are the entrepreneurs? (or, don't confuse brains with a bull market)
- 3 Competition – the leapfrogging game
- 4 Advertising, memory, and custom
- 5 Inventions and innovations in business and science
- 6 Origins of state-owned enterprises
- 7 Restoring the wealth of nations
- Appendixes
- Notes
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
1 - Theory of the entrepreneurial firm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Theory of the entrepreneurial firm
- 2 Who are the entrepreneurs? (or, don't confuse brains with a bull market)
- 3 Competition – the leapfrogging game
- 4 Advertising, memory, and custom
- 5 Inventions and innovations in business and science
- 6 Origins of state-owned enterprises
- 7 Restoring the wealth of nations
- Appendixes
- Notes
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
From time to time it is probably necessary to detach oneself from the technicalities of the argument and to ask quite naively what it is all about.
F.A. Hayek, Economics and KnowledgeAs mathematics penetrated economic analysis during the nineteenth century, a structural, static, rather than a behavioral, dynamic view of enterprises and of markets became widespread. This viewpoint reduced the entrepreneurs to the level of arithmeticians and eliminated all social and cultural context. The viewpoint presented here restores the balance and shows how to understand numerous facets of the behavior of enterprises by looking at the entrepreneurs and other decision makers behind them.
What is a “market”?
One of the cornerstones of economic analysis is the concept of “the market” within which demand and supply curves are drawn and the equilibrium price, to which a firm in a competitive industry adjusts itself, is calculated. The definition of the market involves two steps: The first is to identify the purchasers, and the second to identify the group of sellers who are or could potentially serve these purchasers. The output, that is, the product together with its good substitutes, defines the relevant market.
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- RivalryIn Business, Science, among Nations, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987