For many companies, the past decade has been marked by a sense of turbulence and redefinition. The growing role of information technologies and service businesses has prompted companies to reconsider how they are structured and even what business they are in. These changes have also affected how people work, what skills they need, and what kind of careers they expect. One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job.
The Making of Economic Policy begins by observing that most countries' trade policies are so blatantly contrary to all the prescriptions of the economist that there is no way to understand this discrepancy except by delving into the politics. The same is true for many other dimensions of economic policy.
The globalization of the economy, increasing number of transnational organizations, and rapid changes in robotics, information, and telecommunication technologies are just a few of the factors significantly altering organizational time scales, forms, complexity, and environments. Time scales have shrunk, new organizational forms are emerging, and organizational environments are expanding and mutating at unprecedented rates. Computational modeling affords opportunities to both understand and respond to these complex changes.
Game theory has come to dominate industrial organization economics, but business strategists continue to debate its usefulness. So far, empirical work on the application of game theory to business strategy has been too limited to force a consensus. As a (partial) remedy, Games Businesses Play uses detailed case studies of competitive interaction to explore the uses and limits of game theory as a tool for business strategists.
Technical innovation has moved to center stage in contemporary debates on economic theory and policy, and Chris Freeman and Luc Soete have played a prominent part in these debates. For this new edition of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, they have rewritten all the existing chapters and added ten new ones that address recent advances in theory and in policymaking. In the new chapters they deal with the international dimensions of technical change including underdevelopment, technology transfer, international trade, and globalization.
This upper-level undergraduate text provides an introduction to industrial organization theory along with applications and nontechnical analyses of the legal system and antitrust laws. Using the modern approach but without emphasizing the mathematical generality inherent in many of the arguments, it bridges the gap between existing nontheoretical texts written for undergraduates and highly technical texts written for graduate students. The book can also be used in masters' programs, and advanced graduate students will find it a convenient guide to modern industrial organization.
Is capitalism everywhere driven by the same logic of market forces, contract, and individualistic motivation? Or is Japan different? These eighteen contributions by leading Japanese economists shed light on a number of issues in this increasingly important debate. The variety of perspectives and the range of firms covered -- not only the large industrial corporation but cooperatives, public enterprises, and mutual life insurance companies as well -- provide a broad overview that few other books on Japanese business can offer.
Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress; innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a byproduct of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop a unique approach in which innovation is viewed as a deliberate outgrowth of investments in industrial research by forward-looking, profit-seeking agents. They also devote attention to the place of international trade in the growth process, including the transmission of innovations from the industrial economies to the LDCs.
This collection of work by economist, consultant, and expert witness Franklin M. Fisher constitutes an integrated body of the economic analysis of the law, with particular emphasis on antitrust issues. Fisher's involvement with applying economic analysis to real disputes and to problems of microeconomic policy has resulted in valuable lessons. These lessons are incorporated in themes running through many of these essays about the uses and abuses, achievements and shortcomings, of economic analysis.
