While giving price competition due credit, Baumol stresses that large firms use innovation as a prime competitive weapon. However, as he explains it, firms do not wish to risk too much innovation, because it is costly, and can be made obsolete by rival innovation. So firms have split the difference through the sale of technology licenses and participation in technology-sharing compacts that pay huge dividends to the economy as a whole--and thereby made innovation a routine feature of economic life. This process, in Baumol's view, accounts for the unparalleled growth of modern capitalist economies. Drawing on extensive research and years of consulting work for many large global firms, Baumol shows in this original work that the capitalist growth process, at least in societies where the rule of law prevails, comes far closer to the requirements of economic efficiency than is typically understood.
Resounding with rare intellectual force, this book marks a milestone in the comprehension of the accomplishments of our free-market economic system--a new understanding that, suggests the author, promises to benefit many countries that lack the advantages of this immense innovation machine.
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"The first section of the book, devoted to the "capitalist growth mechanism," is the most interesting. Here Baumol develops his vision of a capitalist economy as consisting of competitive price-taking sector and an oligopolistic sector in which competition occurs more often on the innovation margin rather than on the price margin. The pharmaceutical and computer industries are cases in point. This oligopolistic sector is the economy's engine of growth. Firms here must innovate or they die; they also must price discriminate or die because the heavy fixed costs of innovation cannot be covered if everyone pays a price equal to marginal cost. These costs must be recouped in the same way that railroads were forced to price discriminate to cover their fixed costs for rolling stock and permanent way. Baumol cautions antitrust authorities against jumping to the conclusion that departures from marginal-cost pricing are necessarily evident of monopoly power."
"As Baumol's book proceeds, it devotes a generally increasing share of space to formal models...[and] it was somewhat dissapointing...to discover how much of the second half of the book is devoted to model building as opposed to discussion..."
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