Organizational learning, intrafirm externalities and industry evolution

摘要

In this dissertation I study the impact of organizational learning on firm costs and market structure. I first match a detailed model of organizational learning to data on observed learning curves. I then explore the implications of the model for industry evolution. In industries where the production process is complex I find that surviving firms earn above normal profits that persist in the face of competition.;In chapter 1, I review the literature on firm learning. I place the idea of the learning organization in the context of leading theories of the firm, review some pertinent empirical findings, and summarize the implications of these findings for the modeling of firm learning. In the process I motivate the concepts of production recipes and intrafirm externalities that are the primary conceptual innovations in this dissertation.;Chapter 2 is co-authored with Stuart Kauffman, Jose Lobo and Karl Shell. We do two things in the paper. First, we put forward some elements of a microeconomic theory of technological evolution. This involves expanding the notion of the production plan to include the recipe---the complete description of the underlying engineering process. Second, we use the recipes approach in constructing a simple microeconomic model of shop-floor learning by doing. We simulate the dynamics of the model and report the effects of changes in the basic parameters on the resulting engineering experience curves. For correctly chosen values of these parameters, the predictions of the model match the observed data on experience curves.;Where in chapter 2 my co-authors and I study a single firm in isolation, in chapter 3 I turn to industry dynamics. I ask: What firm-specific factors cause above normal profits to persist in some industries and not others? I provide an answer to this question based on the complexity of the production process in different industries. I find that rents dissipate quickly in industries where production is relatively simple, while persistent quasi-rents accrue to surviving firms in industries where production is relatively complex. The dynamics of the model match observed features of industry life cycles.