Exploring the Niche Overlaps Between Organizational Ecology and Industrial Economics

The goal of this essay is to bring the work of organizational ecologists on population dynamics to the attention of economists. Following a relatively brief exposition of the basic structure of the arguments made by organizational ecologists, we explore a number of areas where cross-fertilization between organizational ecology and economics seems promising. These include: examining the limits of competitive exclusion, exploring how models that focus on selection between firms might apply to selection between products, linking models of population dynamics to models which explain changes in market structures over time, and understanding the sources of structural inertia that limit the ability of firms to react to market events. We conclude by making a few observations on what each group of scholars might learn from the other.