Book Review: Increasing Returns and Path Dependency in the Economy
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Increasing Returns and Path Dependency in the Economy is a collection of papers written by Arthur and several other co-authors, and it may be a breakthrough in helping to build a bridge between evolutionary economics and marketing. The volume will clearly be useful in doctoral seminars, but should also be of interest to marketing scholars because its discussion of how markets evolve and how sustainable competitive advantage is created is more rigorous than marketing's richer but fuzzier "product life-cycle" model. In addition, because of its coverage of the dynamics of continuous learning and change in markets-a current hot topic-it has great general relevance for marketing. Moreover, the book reveals opportunities for marketing scholars to provide insight to economists early in the development of the theory of positive returns and, thus, help prevent the very phenomenon they study-a suboptimal path dependency in their theory development. Much depends on whether the many excellent marketing scholars studying innovation, diffusion, market learning, new product development, brand equity, distribution relationships, and penetration pricing become familiar with the research and terms described in this book and reach out to have an intellectual discourse with influential economists. Although it is possible that economists will initiate this discourse, it is improbable because not a single marketing paper is referenced in the text. In the subsequent review I focus on the four papers likely to be of most interest to marketing scholars. Among the papers I do not address here are those discussing industry and market location patterns produced by gravitational positive returns to scale, in which factors of production and customer attraction advantages evolve for some locations more than others. These papers support Porter's (1990) contention that particular locations and nations develop manufacturing and marketing expertise that provide sustainable competitive advantages to firms in the global marketplace. Nor do I discuss the technical papers describing the mathematics of modeling path dependency. It is safe to assume they have the math right (and I lack the expertise to even pretend to critique the models against alternative chaos theory formulations).
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[2] S. Winter,et al. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change.by Richard R. Nelson; Sidney G. Winter , 1987 .
[3] Peter R. Dickson,et al. Toward a General Theory of Competitive Rationality , 1992 .
[4] A. Shleifer,et al. Politics of Market Socialism , 1994 .
[5] J. Gans,et al. How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists , 1994 .