Rivalry
In Business, Science, among Nations

Reuven Brenner (Author)

9780521385848, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 1990

256 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

"The quest for a parsimonious theory of economic change is hardly novel. It is comparatively rare, though, that historical and contemporary fact are allowed to act as the judge of whether the theoretical enterprise should stand or fall. Reuven Brenner's Rivalry: In Business, Science, among Nations makes refreshing reading for its painstaking effort to provide empirical support for the argument." Edward H. Lorenz, Business History Review

Rivalry is an attempt to understand facets of entrepreneurial societies by integrating the economic analysis with historical, political and psychological considerations, customarily shunned by economists. The author argues that decisions to make new business ventures, and readiness to take risks are both related to concepts of ranking hierarchies on local, national or international levels. He then constructs a theory of business enterprise and of rivalry supported by evidence on entrepreneurship, innovation, advertising, all examined with their historical, political or organisational concerns. This notion of rivalry among businessmen is used to derive guidelines for anti-trust legislation. Instead of pricing, profitability, concentration ratios and other criteria used today to infer non-competitive behaviour, he suggests using a measure of a firm's relative rate of innovation to infer it. By extending the notion of rivalry to the political sphere, national and international, guidelines are derived to evaluate the performance of state-owned enterprises and to examine policies related to free trade.

1. A theory of business enterprise
2. Who are the entrepreneurs?
3. Competition: the leapfrogging game
4. On memory, advertising and custom
5. Inventions and discoveries, in science in particular
6. Origins of state-owned enterprises
7. Restoring the wealth of nations.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]