The Economic Journal 

About: The Economic Journal is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Unemployment & Wage. It has an ISSN identifier of 0013-0133. Over the lifetime, 9768 publications have been published receiving 696986 citations. The journal is also known as: Economic Journal & Economic Journal (Oxford).

Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R & D

Abstract: The authors assume that firms invest in R&D not only to generate innovations, but also to learn from competitors and extraindustry knowledge sources (e.g., university and government labs). This argument suggests that the ease of learning within an industry will both affect R&D spending, and condition the influence of appropriability and technological opportunity conditions on R&D. For example, they show that, contrary to the traditional result, intraindustry spillovers may encourage equilibrium industry R&D investment. Regression results confirm that the impact of appropriability and technological opportunity conditions on R&D is influenced by the ease and character of learning. Copyright 1989 by Royal Economic Society.

Stability in Competition

Abstract: After the work of the late Professor F. Y. Edgeworth one may doubt that anything further can be said on the theory of competition among a small number of entrepreneurs. However, one important feature of actual business seems until recently to have escaped scrutiny. This is the fact that of all the purchasers of a commodity, some buy from one seller, some from another, in spite of moderate differences of price. If the purveyor of an article gradually increases his price while his rivals keep theirs fixed, the diminution in volume of his sales will in general take place continuously rather than in the abrupt way which has tacitly been assumed.

Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events*

Abstract: This paper explores the dynamics of allocation under increasing returns in a context where increasing returns arise naturally: agents choosing between technologies competing for adoption. Modern, complex technologies often display increasing returns to adoption in that the more they are adopted, the more experience is gained with them, and the more they are improved.1 When two or more increasing-return technologies 'compete' then, for a 'market' of potential adopters, insignificant events may by chance give one of them an initial advantage in adoptions. This technology may then improve more than the others, so it may appeal to a wider proportion of potential adopters. It may therefore become further adopted and further improved. Thus a technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually 'corner the market' of potential adopters, with the other technologies becoming locked out. Of course, under different 'insignificant events' - unexpected successes in the performance of prototypes, whims of early developers, political circumstances - a different technology might achieve sufficient adoption and improvement to come to dominate. Competitions between technologies may have, multiple potential outcomes. It is well known that allocation problems with increasing returns tend to exhibit multiple equilibria, and so it is not surprising that multiple outcomes should appear here. Static analysis can typically locate these multiple equilibria, but usually it cannot tell us which one will be 'selected'. A dynamic approach might be able to say more. By allowing the possibility of 'random events' occurring during adoption, it might examine how these influence ' selection' of the outcome - how some sets of random 'historical events' might cumulate to drive the process towards one market-share outcome, others to drive it towards another. It might also reveal how the two familiar increasingreturns properties of non-predictability and potential inefficiency come about: how increasing returns act to magnify chance events as adoptions take place, so that

Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving*

Abstract: When people make donations to privately provided public goods, such as charity, there may be many factors influencing their decision other than altruism. Social pressure, guilt, sympathy, or simply a desire for a "warm glow" may all be important. This paper considers such impure altruism formally and develops a wide set of implications. In particular, this paper discusses the invariance proposition of public goods, solves for the sufficient conditions for neutrality to hold, examines the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving, and calibrates the model based on econometric studies in order to consider policy experiments. Impure altruism is shown to be more consistent with observed patterns of giving than the conventional pure altruism approach, and to have policy implications that may differ widely from those of the conventional models. Copyright 1990 by Royal Economic Society.