A dominant view in the Coasean law-and-economics tradition is that the firm (including in its form as the corporation) is nothing but a nexus of contracts: the firm is entirely a matter of contract law, and the corporate entity, the legal fiction of corporate personhood, is nothing but a name...

Modularity is a very general set of principles for managing complexity. By breaking up a complex system into discrete pieces--which can then communicate with one another only through standardized interfaces within a standardized architecture--one can eliminate what would otherwise be an...

Formal theories of economic growth, including newly popular models of "endogenous" growth, rely on a conception of knowledge as explicit and costlessly transferable. Once created, knowledge can spill easily into the hands of others at zero marginal cost, a process of "spillover" that is the...

In this essay, I attempt to take seriously Schumpeter?s perspective on competition as fundamentally about innovation. Drawing on literatures that concern themselves centrally with the patterns and processes of technological change, I focus on a set of issues very much on the present-day agenda:...

In the last 25 years, the economics of organization has emerged as a thriving branch of economics. In spite of some variety among the contributions to this field, it is fair to say that the literature is in agreement on the fundamentals. The basic insight is this: in addition to production costs...

In neoclassical theory, knowledge generates increasing returns-and therefore growth-because it is a public good that can be costlessly reused once created. In fact, however, much knowledge in the economy is actually tacit and not easily transmitted-and thus not an obvious source of increasing...

In a series of classic works, most notably The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), Alfred Chandler focused the spotlight on the large, vertically integrated corporation, which emerged in the late nineteenth century to replace what had been a fragmented and localized structure of...