While creative destruction and disruptive innovation change the entrepreneurial landscape; regulation - especially regulation of sectorial markets and competition regulation - can delay this change or even bring it to a halt. Uber plays an active role between these two forces: first as an agent of creative destruction and then possibly in championing regulation on its own terms. Grounded in a particular understanding of the economic concept of the market as a series of processes, this book explores the implications of creative destruction, competition regulation and the role that businesses play. Instead of discussing these relations in a purely abstract manner, this book uses Uber as a case study.

While creative destruction and disruptive innovation change the entrepreneurial landscape; regulation – especially regulation of sectorial markets and competition regulation – can delay this change or even bring it to a halt. Uber plays an active role between these two forces: first as an agent of creative destruction and then possibly in championing regulation on its own terms. Grounded in a particular understanding of the economic concept of the market as a series of processes, this book explores the implications of creative destruction, competition regulation and the role that businesses play. Instead of discussing these relations in a purely abstract manner, this book uses Uber as a case study.

Pan Am, Gimbel’s, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland—all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. “Creative destruction,” he said, is the driving force of capitalism. Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as “the most sophisticated conservative” of the twentieth century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril—to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter’s view, the general prosperity produced by the “capitalist engine” far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the specter of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983—the centennial of the birth of both men—Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate. Prophet of Innovation is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter’s writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world’s greatest economist, lover, and horseman—and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Transactions have always taken place. For hundreds of years that ‘place’ was a market or, more recently, a shopping mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by their virtual counterparts – online platforms. Here, author Michael C. Munger demonstrates how these platforms act as matchmakers or middlemen, a role traders have adopted since the very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference today is that the matchmakers often play no direct part in buying or selling anything – they just help buyers and sellers find each other. Their major contribution has been to reduce the costs of organising and completing purchases, rentals or exchanges. The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises contends that the key role of online platforms is to create reductions in transaction costs and it highlights the importance of three ‘Ts’ - triangulation, transfer and trust – in bringing down those costs.

Schumpeter's framework of creative destruction applied to the rapidly changing telecommunications and related Internet industries. More than fifty years ago, Joseph Schumpeter stated that processes intrinsic to a capitalist society produce a "creative destruction," whereby innovations destroy obsolete technologies, only to be assaulted in turn by newer and more efficient rivals. This book asks whether the current chaotic state of the telecommunications and related Internet industries is evidence of creative destruction, or simply a result of firms, governments, and others wasting valuable resources with limited benefits to society as a whole. In telecommunications, for example, wireless, IP, and cable-based technologies are all fighting for a share of the market currently dominated by older, circuit-switched, copper-terminated networks. This process is accompanied by mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and investment and divestment in worldwide markets.The selections discuss the primary challenge facing firms, governments, and other players: how to exploit the opportunities created by such destructive dynamics. They highlight the importance of national regulations promoting competition and nonmonopolistic market structures, as well as the role of new technologies such as the Internet in driving down the price and speeding the diffusion of innovative products and services in telecommunications, media, electronic retailing, and other "new economy" industries.

This Handbook grapples conceptually and practically with what the sharing economy - which includes entities ranging from large for-profit firms like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Taskrabbit, and Upwork to smaller, non-profit collaborative initiatives - means for law, and how law, in turn, is shaping critical aspects of the sharing economy. Featuring a diverse set of contributors from many academic disciplines and countries, the book compiles the most important, up-to-date research on the regulation of the sharing economy. The first part surveys the nature of the sharing economy, explores the central challenge of balancing innovation and regulatory concerns, and examines the institutions confronting these regulatory challenges, and the second part turns to a series of specific regulatory domains, including labor and employment law, consumer protection, tax, and civil rights. This groundbreaking work should be read by anyone interested in the dynamic relationship between law and the sharing economy.

This book builds on the idea that peer-to-peer infrastructures are gradually becoming the general conditions of work, economy, and society. Using a four-scenario approach, the authors seek to simplify possible outcomes and to explore relevant trajectories of the current techno-economic paradigm within and beyond capitalism.