This paper explores the relationship between the theory of the firm and the theory of financial markets. I begin with Mises’s claim that the defining feature of an industrialized, market economy is the use of financial markets to allocate capital among firms and among industries. This...

Born in 1930, Brian J. Loasby is generally recognised as the leading post-Marshallian economic theorist. He has published widely on the theory of economic organisation, methodology, and the history of economic ideas, including Smith and Keynes. His work includes the now-classic Choice,...

A new framework is presented that suggests that scientific progress requires a balance between exploitation of existing research programs (normal science) and exploration of new research programs (revolutionary science) Too much pluralism can be as destructive for scientific progress as too...

The theoretical perspective of “localised learning” has been accused of not only being “fuzzy”, but also of being incapable of providing policy prescriptions. This paper sets out to discover whether deducting policy advice from the localised learning literature does in fact pose a...

Modding – the modification of existing products by consumers – is increasingly exploited by manufacturers to enhance product development and sales. In the computer games industry modding has evolved into a development model in which users act as unpaid “complementors” to manufacturers’...

The arguably dominant contemporary approach to the analysis of sustained competitive advantage is the resource-based view. Taking Barney (1991) and Peteraf (1993) as representative summary statements of the view, we argue that much resource-based research rests on partial, implicit and...

This case is the first in a series of company cases on strategy, organization and management of technology headed by Jens Frøslev Christensen at Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School. The objective of these cases is twofold: to generate empirical inputs...

In his seminal article Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness Granovetter argued that economic action is embedded in social relations and structures that affect its functioning, and that economic action should be analyzed as such. In theories of the business firm the...