This book provides a survey of the theory and of the empirical knowledge about the links between market structure and technological change.

The past two decades have seen a gradual but noticeable change in the economic organization of innovative activity. Most firms used to integrate research and development with activities such as production, marketing, and distribution. Today firms are forming joint ventures, research and development alliances, licensing deals, and a variety of other outsourcing arrangements with universities, technology-based start-ups, and other established firms. In many industries, a division of innovative labor is emerging, with a substantial increase in the licensing of existing and prospective technologies. In short, technology and knowledge are becoming definable and tradable commodities. Although researchers have made significant advances in understanding the determinants and consequences of innovation, until recently they have paid little attention to how innovation functions as an economic process. This book examines the nature and workings of markets for intermediate technological inputs. It looks first at how industry structure, the nature of knowledge, and intellectual property rights facilitate the development of technology markets. It then examines the impacts of these markets on firm boundaries, the division of labor within the economy, industry structure, and economic growth. Finally, it examines the implications of this framework for public policy and corporate strategy. Combining theoretical perspectives from economics and management with empirical analysis, the book also draws on historical evidence and case studies to flesh out its research results.

Through three case studies, this book investigates whether digital industries are naturally monopolistic and evaluates policy approaches to market power.

Technical advance requires resources and is motivated by the quest for profits; therefore, the rate and direction of advance is determined by the economic system. Recognition of this fact has focused attention on the performance of the market economy in the allocation of resources to technical advance, and the consequent body of research is surveyed and synthesised in this book. The theories of market structure and innovation proposed by Schumpeter, Galbraith, Arrow, Schmookler, Scherer, Mansfield, Phillips, Barzel, Kamien and Schwartz, Loury, Nelson and Winter, Grabowski, Dasgupta and Stiglitz, and others are presented in an integrated form. These theories deal with the nature of competition, the incentives to innovate and the pace of innovative activity under different market structures, and the existence of a market structure that yields the most rapid rate of innovation. In addition, the findings of seventy empirical studies dealing with various facets of the microeconomics of technical innovation are presented. The book is designed to be accessible to economists working in a variety of situations - in universities, business and government - and who are concerned with questions of technical innovation. It is also suitable for senior-level undergraduates and first year graduate students approaching the subject in a comprehensive way for the first time.

These are times of profound structural change. They are also times of great uncertainty as new forms of organization and market behavior emerge to replace and reshape older forms. Nowhere is this uncertainty felt more than in industrial organization theory. Notwithstanding the revolution it has undergone in the last decade due to the development of new tools and directions of analysis, the discipline has yet to create a coherent new body of thought. This book, in bringing together the work of academics who have all played a major role in injecting new life into the discipline, is an attempt to move toward this goal. Opening with an introduction by Alfredo Del Monte to the terms of the new debate relating to the rise of the new technological, behavioral and organizational forms, the book moves on to consider the contribution of three new approaches to industrial organization theory. John Sutton and Giovanni Dosi assess, respectively, the contribution of game theory and the evolutionary approach, while John Hey reviews the application of experimental methods. Following chapters, by Malcolm Sawyer and Keith Cowling, assess the relationship between structure and the characteristics of the industrial system as a whole, while Alfredo Del Monte and Fabio Esposito then discuss the significance of intra-industry differences related to variations in the flexibility of organizational structure. The contribution by Roberta Marchionatti and Francesco Silva, using the Italian case as an example, illustrates the impact of public intervention on industrial structure. Subsequently, theoretical issues regarding the internal organization of the firm are examined by Neil Kay, who assesses the joint venture as a particular form of collaborative activity, and by Nicola Acocella, who reviews different theories of the multinational firm. Another contribution to this set of chapters on the theory of the firm is Ricardo Martina's on the duopoly setting. The book concludes with three chapters, respectively by Paul Stoneman, Damiano Silipo, Neil O'Higgins and Patrizia Sbriglia on different issues concerning the relationship between technical progress and market structure.

In this wide ranging exposition of the various economic theories of technological change, Stanislaw Gomulka relates them to rates of growth experienced by different economies in both the short and the long term. Analysis of countries as diverse as Japan, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom demonstrates that there is an interdependence between technological change and the institutional and cultural characteristics of different countries, which can have a profound effect on their rates of growth. All of the major, relevant models are discussed, including those of Kuznets and Phelps, but throughout the emphasis is on the creation of a unified theoretical framework to help explain the impact of technological progress on both a micro and a macro scale.

An area of neglect in much of current economic theory has been its lack of attention to the impact of technological innovation on the structure and behavior of firms and the market. This book is a comprehensive study of the economic implications of technological change for three primary institutions: the firm, the market, and the civil sector.