Neo-Schumpeterian and other theories of the firm: a comment and personal retrospective

摘要

The publication of Sidney Winter's 1968 paper, "Toward a Neo-Schumpeterian Theory of the Firm," provides an occasion for reflecting on the progress of economic theorizing about the firm in the almost forty years since it was first circulated (Winter, 2006). This brief comment is a rather personal one, reflecting my own particular interests in "costly and bounded rationality" and the "economics of managing." Since 1968, the program outlined in Winter's paper has received considerable attention, by himself and others. In particular, significant progress was made in their book by Nelson and Winter (1982), as well as since then by many authors. Since that progress has been amply documented in two relatively recent issues of Industrial and Corporate Change (see Dosi and Malerba, 2002; Dosi et ah, 2003), it is not necessary for me to undertake that review, a task for which, in any case, I am not well qualified. So I shall restrict my attention to a few observations about related developments in some other streams of economic theory, including some currents in "mainstream" economics. I have organized these comments under five headings: 1. Equilibrium and dynamics 2. Working, managing, and entrepreneurship 3. Costly rationality and decentralization 4. Incentives 5. Bounded rationality