Contenu du sommaire : Trente ans d'économie industrielle

This paper presents the lessons learnt by an economist from managing a publishing firm, Oxford University Press. Firstly, although decisions about pricing and output are important, they are by no means the only or even the chief concern of management. They abstract from decisions regarding the activities the firm should or should not be undertaking or the choice of an appropriate internal organisation. Thus, in managing a firm one learns that efficient resource allocation is no longer just a question of the logic of choice but a question of social organisation. Second, models of the economic system based on assumptions about perfect knowledge make no sense. It is precisely because knowledge is fragmented and imperfect that we require economic systems to further the efficient use of resources. In general, experience in business helps one to understand how firms, as well as being part of economic systems, are economic systems in themselves.

This paper discusses the way in which the economic literature has solved Williamson's selective intervention puzzle: why is that vertical integration, which gives the purchasing firm more control over its trading partner, not always more profitable than vertical separation? I argue that all the models which tackle this problem share a common feature: in the contracts which describe the relations between agents, the principal still makes decisions and acts after the contract is signed. As a consequence, the greater control provided by vertical integration can affect the principal's ex-post behavior in ways which are ex-ante point of view detrimental to its profits.

The paper surveys in a critical manner the recent development in firms theories. It is organized around two directions. The first one analyses the contributions recently proposed around the vision of the firm envisaged as a “nexus of contracts”, focusing on the different recent variants of the theories of property rights and of imperfect contracts applied to the firm. The second – starting from Cyert, March and Simon – passing by the contributions of Edith Penrose, Chandler and evolutionary theorists, analyses the theories of the firm conceived as a processor of information and knowledge and finally as a “nexus of competencies”. The strength but also the limits of both approaches are highlighted.

The key role of institutions for economic performance has recently been acknowledged in the economic policy debate. This paper aims at pointing out the main policy lessons and the recommendations to be drawn from New Institutional Economics (NIE), when considering the organization of markets. We examine, first, the domains – namely the establishment of property rights, the management of externalities and the maintenance of the competitive process – on which NIE identifies the potential impact of institutional tools on market performance. Second, we highlight the tradeoffs identified in the literature regarding the organization of an institutional system. This leads us to consider the respective virtues and drawbacks of hierarchical vs. transactional, public vs. private, centralized vs. decentralized and formal vs. informal ordering. Finally, we conclude by showing how NIE draws attention to the difficulties faced by political or economic decision-makers when they attempt to enhance market efficiency by reforming institutional frameworks.

We observe for several decades a general strengthening of intellectual property rights. This environment crystallizes the tensions around patents, copyright and trademarks. We present the various factors that have contributed to this situation with a focus on the digital world and especially the Internet. In this area, solutions pass through the application of traditional legal tools to information goods (traditional or completely new) or by changing the law and the creation of new protection tools. In this context, the development of Internet has led to the emergence of a first and second market of domain names. We examine the economic regulation of these two markets and their recent developments. We show in particular that conflicts involving intellectual property are frequent and specific rules for the resolution of these conflicts are implemented.

The following contribution aims to analyze the sources of creativity in a modern, highly innovative and “stylised” company that does not rely on traditional sources of innovation (large R&D units, research cooperative agreements, R&D contracts with university centres, etc.). We show that the theories of the innovative firm have to be coupled with the understanding of local innovative processes. We consider communities (and in particular knowing communities) as relevant units of analysis to tackle our understanding of the innovative organization and to further analyze firms as a complex ecology of communities (inside and in-between communities of specialists) within the external environment (in “spaces and places” fostering and supporting innovation).

Economic sociology and economics converge to highlight the role of social networks in the market coordination of agents. Social ties are involved in the flow of information. They constitute social capital for agents who hold them. Their density promotes the emergence of social norms that contribute to the regulation of economic relationships. The origin of the structure of social networks and their dynamics remain unexplored. This article assumes that the dynamics of social networks is due to the intentionality of strategic agents who seize the opportunities offered by the network structure but will also divert institutional devices (contracts and organizations) to intentionally build social capital. The accumulation of social capital and the embedding process lead to the emergence of extra-economic social norms that change the nature of maximization by agents by involving sociological dimensions such as the need to belong to a group and need of recognition. In this regard, the sociological analysis of social networks complements recent developments in behavioral economics (Benabou and Tirole, 2006).

Leading on from the measurement of the geographical dimension of knowledge externalities at aggregated spatial levels, the works carried out in the economic geography of innovation have gradually turned towards the analysis of the mechanisms underlying the spatial diffusion of knowledge (absorption capacity, face-to-face exchanges, professional mobility). Bringing these mechanisms to the fore has justified new researches which have been directed at understanding individual behavioural patterns in terms of cooperation for innovation. Indeed, the dynamics of the networks of actors who nowadays characterise collective innovation phenomena and combine local and global dimensions is based upon such behaviour. Thus, it would appear that a better understanding of the factors determining the spatial configuration of these networks has become necessary in order to fully grasp the relationships between innovation and space. The objective of this article is to go back over the logic of the researches carried out in this field during the last decades.

The case for government intervention via technology policy in the UK in the later 20th century was typically justified by « market failure » arguments. In this paper I argue firstly that an analysis of technology trends indicates that non-market failures, mainly systemic and dynamic in nature, were a more basic source of British technological shortcomings. Secondly, an analysis of trends in technology policy suggests that narrowly economics-based views too often hampered good intentions to reform policy along more appropriate lines, and restricted development of any serious capabilities for « policy learning » in the field. The main line of argument represents an application of the Richardson-Sen model of capabilities and networking to the government/policy field. There follows a discussion of policy learning in a context of network misalignment and systemic failure over the longer term of British technology policy, although there have been more encouraging efforts to overcome some of these problems in recent times. The paper concludes that « market failure » is at best a gross simplification of the issues confronting British technology policy in this era, and often an obstruction in the way of applying more constructive network-oriented policies.

In the current scenario, a large and growing number of policies for local development and cluster upgrading explicitly incorporate the idea of innovation as a systemic process, embedded in specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts and intermingled with international challenges, opportunities, and strategies. These policies bring new challenges to the activities of analysis and evaluation: despite the diffusion of a systemic approach both in innovation thinking and in innovation policies, a proper system-based framework for the analysis and evaluation of these policies is far from being achieved (Bellandi and Caloffi, 2010). Trying to advance our reflection on this field, we propose some exemplifications on a quite delimited set of contexts, i.e. those of industrial districts (Italian, in particular), characterized by SMEs clusters facing contemporary globalization challenges. Focusing on innovation policies aimed at supporting functional upgrading of districts and clusters soaked in changing international filières and value chains, the paper discusses the meaning of evaluation of industrial policies when a systemic perspective is considered. On such premises a couple of exemplifications are illustrated some features of appropriate evaluation methods. Finally, some methodological aspects concerning the design process of evaluation activities are discussed.

While the US Supreme Court, throughout its judgment in Trinko, rejects the essential facilities doctrine, in the European Union it is not only accepted but even extended to intangible assets. Two contradictory conceptions of competition prevail on either sides of the Atlantic, with regard to the importance of market structures and the question of incentives to innovate. As a pertinent illustration of these different conceptions of competition policies, the Microsoft case seems very eloquent. This article sets out the grounds of the US and EU antitrust authorities' decisions in regard to refusal to deal litigations. In this way, we will spotlight the dominant economic doctrines on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this paper, we discuss the implications of the financial crisis for industrial policy. We show that despite official discourse, industrial policy has continued to exist during the liberal years of essentially the 1990s, in order to accompany important structural changes firms had to face. The crisis has implied a massive intervention in the economy, States pouring money into markets in order to provide liquidity and rescuing heavily indebted banks. Intervention has been so strong that now the discussion is about the « exit strategy ». This does not mean, however, that industrial policy has entered a new phase of return to direct intervention in markets. In fact, the risk of the crisis is that the important debate about industrial policy that started at the beginning of the years 2000 be put in the back stage. The debate prior to the crisis was on the role of industrial policy as a long-term programme, a vision of industrial development that has to be implemented through political consensus. This important debate must continue after and beyond the crisis.

This paper is about what is considered to be the failure of industrial economics. Industrial economists have generally been unwilling or unable to build a clear understanding of the logics and dynamics of industrial systems. As Industrial economists have attached much more importance to rather static, partial problems, their contributions to the way complex systems are evolving over time have remained rather poor. Industrial Economics is, whatever the reasons, very far from having succeeded in satisfying some basic epistemological requirements up to a satisfactory level and thus in building some comprehensive understanding of the way the industrial system function and perform. If you look at industrial economics as it has developed over the years and more so in recent years, you don't find any explicit acknowledgment or analytical integration of the major, inescapable fact that the world or the realities which are the subject matter of industrial economics have dramatically changed. While things have very fundamentally changed, this doesn't seem to have affected the way we raise the issues and solve the problems in industrial economics.

The aim of this paper is to review the articles published in the journal L'Industria over the last 30 years, focusing on issues related to industrial policy. Articles published in the journal have both analysed the characteristics of Italian industry and discussed industrial policy implications. Attention has never been exclusively turned to the Italian case: industry in other countries has been considered, not only in Europe but also elsewhere in the world, in Asia and America. Foreign cases are used as examples to follow or as analyses of partners of or markets for Italian firms. Regarding industrial policy, three phases can be identified in this review. The first 10 years (in the 1980s) discussed the « dirigiste » or « interventionist » type of industrial policy, whereby governments directly intervened in markets by command-and-control and by buying also producers. The second decade, that of the 1990s, saw the adoption of a new approach to industrial policy, whereby governments no longer directly intervene in markets but rather induce behaviour by appropriate incentives and, in terms of structural policy, provide the conditions for competitiveness. These phases correspond to the phases of industrial policy implemented in Italy and the EU. The 21st century starts with a new phase of industrial policy, that this paper tries to characterise by looking at the papers published in L'Industria. The main conclusion is that the new industrial policies are still in the process of being defined in the real world, perhaps waiting for industrial economists to provide guidance. Economists and policy-makers writing in the journal stress that in the current context new models have to be built and new solutions have to be suggested. We add that a number of issues has to be examined for solutions to be proposed.

This paper studies how the 122 first issues of the Revue d'Économie Industrielle are concerned with the links between Industrial Economics and Law, especially in the yield of competition policy.

The purpose of this contribution is to consider the set of contributions published in the Revue d'Économie Industrielle within the thirty years (1977-2007) in order to offer to the reader an overview of the evolution of industrial organization in France during the period. Two main themes are successively investigated: the variety of the main research areas which prevail in the field of industrial organization and the plurality of the theoretical approaches utilized by the contributors to the Revue. The main result of the paper is that the evolution of publications of the Revue reflects the diversity of the theoretical approaches which are to-day competing within the field of industrial organization.