Competition, Knowledge, and Institutions

摘要

The development of new institutional economics (NIE) has been a huge advancement in economics. Despite attempts to integrate concepts such as bounded rationality, however, NIE has predominantly remained a neoclassical, equilibrium-oriented theory which primarily studies institutions only in regard to their effects on allocative efficiency, that is, in regard to transaction and agency costs. This article analyzes the effects of institutions if instead of a neoclassical concept of competition an evolutionary concept of competition in the tradition of Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter is used. Based upon earlier work of Wolfgang Kerber (1996, 1997) and Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (2001), it is shown that the institutional framework for markets influences both the dynamics and the direction of knowledge-generation in competition processes, in which innovations are generated and tested in the market. Or to put it differently: The institutional framework influences the selection environment of the market and therefore channels the development of knowledge in evolutionary competition processes. The paper can also be seen as an attempt at a greater integration of institutional and evolutionary economics.