Rivalry: In Business, Science, among Nations

by Reuven Brenner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521385848
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/26/1990
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Reading Brenner will illuminate the analysis of business behaviour, highlighting the need to understand the 'leapfrogging' game in any interpretation of a firm's rate of growth. Competition and risk are crucial phenomena affecting a firm's performance, and the human response must lie at the centre of any study of business history. This will make Rivalry an important text for anyone considering such issues." J.F. Wilson, Business History

"This is an important book. Schumpeter would have been impressed." Graham Bannock, Business Economist

"Rivalry, extensively researched and documented, is a badly needed, cogently argued, clearly written reaction against static, esoteric economic model building." R.O. Werner, Choice

"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

From the Publisher