Schumpeter’s and Hayek’s view of market coordination as being not aboutefficiency, but about endogenous change and never-ending discovery has beenincreasingly recognized even by the mainstream of economics. Underlying this view isthe notion of creative learning agents who bring about...

In constitutional political economy, the citizens' constitutional interests determine the social contract that is binding for the post-constitutional market game. However, following traditional preference subjectivism, it is left open what the constitutional interest are. Using the example of...

Spatial proximity is assumed in the literature to be a prerequisite and trigger for cooperation and, subsequently, innovation. This paper examines conceptually the role of proximity between actors for cooperation activities. Using theories and findings from social psychology and combining them...

The paper focuses on the territorial shaping of knowledge dynamics as one of the driving forces for innovation. Knowledge dynamics are unfolding from processes of creation, use, transformation and diffusion of knowledge. Due to both the ongoing restructuring of global value chains and the...

That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

Innovations are inherently connected to knowledge transfers. The need of face-to-face contacts to transfer tacit knowledge is commonly argued to cause a regional dimension of innovative activities. The paper presents an alternative explanation based on a model of boundedly rational actors who...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...