Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

It’s Hayek-Klein Day, and bloggers are sharing their favorite Hayek quotes (Boudreaux, Horwitz). Here’s one of mine:

The typical intellectual . . . need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.

That’s from “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” published in 1949. (See this for an elaboration of Hayek’s argument.) Substitute “blogger” for “intellectual” and the passage could have been written today!

| Peter Klein |

Next Tuesday, 13 May, is the proposal deadline for the 2008 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data. I participated in the 2007 version and got a lot out of it. This year’s event takes place in Washington, DC instead of Kauffman headquarters in Kansas City.

Documents from the 2007 symposium can be reviewed at SSRN.

A personal note: While driving to last year’s symposium I found myself on Kansas City’s Volker Boulevard, named for the great philanthropist William Volker, whose support was instrumental in the rebirth of Austrian economics in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The Volker Fund paid all or part of the salaries of Mises at NYU and Hayek at Chicago and employed Murray Rothbard as a consultant, book reviewer, and talent scout while he was writing Man, Economy, and State and America’s Great Depression. Wikipedia has some background information on the Volker Fund; you can find more in Hülsmann’s Last Knight (pp. 867-68 and passim) and Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (pp. 181-87 and passim). In Kansas City Volker is remembered as a generous philanthropist who supported schools and hospitals, developed a program for prison reform, and was a major benefactor of the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri - Kansas City).

It would be nice to have a full-scale Volker biography. Anybody up to the task? Volker’s company and foundation records are housed at UMKC. Herb Cournelle wrote a short biography in 1951, Mr. Anonymous: The Story of William Volker, but I haven’t been able to locate a copy.

| Peter Klein |

Today’s Weekend Article from the Mises Institute is “The Sphere of Economic Calculation,” an excerpt from chapter 12 of Mises’s Human Action. (Check out the super-cool graphic!) The article expands on Mises’s pathbreaking 1920 paper on the need for prices in any system that aims at a rational allocation of resources.

Mises’s theory of factor pricing and its role in cost accounting — what he calls the problem of ”economic calculation” — is near and dear to my heart, having written one of my first published articles on the subject. It’s also received a bit of attention here at O&M (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

| Nicolai Foss |

Former O&M guest blogger Dick Langlois is IMHO one of the most original thinkers in the field of economic organization. He is also one of the best writers in management and in economics. So I try to keep track of his writings and usually succeed. However, this paper, “The Austrian Theory of the Firm: Retrospect and Prospect,” written for a conference at the George Mason Law School last May, had escaped my attention until today.

Dick develops a number of related arguments. One is that Hayek (of the 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”) developed richer insights in economic organization than Coase.  Moreover, by pointing out the importance of dispersed knowledge, the coordination problem this raises, and the importance of ”change” for “economic problems,” Hayek anticipated the capabilities theory of the firm. In a parallel argument, Dick links his own work on the capabilities theory of the firm to Austrian capital theory (see also here and here). He ends by speculating on the future of Austrian arguments in the theory of the firm, noting various manifestations, particularly in strategic management, of these arguments (he notes that “Some work in this literature is close in spirit to my own, in some cases extremely close (Jacobides and Winter 2005)” — one agrees).  Definitely worth a read!

| Nicolai Foss |

A small handful of papers have become highly influential in economics as well as in management and organization research. One such paper is Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a paper that emerged in the context of the debate on the viability and efficiency of planned resource allocation on the societal level (i.e., socialism) that raged among academic economists in (particularly) the inter-war period. Hayek famously argued that planning confronts inherent knowledge-based constraints, and these constraints are certainly binding at a scale of activity that makes comprehensive overall management/planning of economy-wide resource allocation deeply inefficient. Many modern management thinkers have echoed this argument, arguing that “traditional” authority relations are increasingly challenged by the (increasingly) dispersed nature of knowledge.

However, at least when applied to authority in firms the Hayekian knowledge argument arguably misconstrues the nature of managerial authority, because it is based on an epistemic fallacy. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

June is an exciting month for O&Mers looking for research conferences. First up is ACAC 2008, 12-14 June in Atlanta. ACAC, which has received high marks on this blog, is an annual workshop organized by Rich Makadok emphasizing the “big issues” in strategic management. Next is the DRUID 25th Anniversary Conference, 17-20 June in Copenhagen, with the theme of “Entrepreneurship and Innovation.” The distinguished participant list includes Rajshree Agarwal, Carliss Baldwin, Bo Carlsson, Kathy Eisenhardt, Maryann Feldman, Bronwyn Hall, Steve Klepper, Anita McGahan, Joanne Oxley, Olav Sorenson, Scott Stern, Sid Winter, and some Foss guy. Immediately afterward is ISNIE’s 12th annual meeting, 20-21 June, in Toronto. I am on the program committee, working with president-elect Scott Masten, and we got a bunch of great submissions this year. Barry Weingast and Robert Ellickson are keynoters. The preliminary program should be up on the ISNIE website soon.

Also, for graduate students in economics, history, philosophy, political science, business administration, and related disciplines there’s the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, 13-18 June in Auburn, Alabama. The RGS is an intensive workshop and research seminar on Austrian economics that uses Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State as its core text. I am one of the discussion leaders.

If I could teleport I’d attend all four!

| Nicolai Foss |

Peter and I (well, mostly Peter) have often contrasted the Knightian notion of entrepreneurial judgment with other notions of entrepreneurship, mainly Kirzner’s concept of alertness (here). In “Entrepreneurship: From Opportunity Discovery to Judgment” (download from this page), we provide what is no doubt the definitive statement on the issue. The paper is a draft of chapter 2 in our forthcoming book, Entrepreneurial Judgment and the Theory of the Firm, and constructive criticism is most appreciated. Here is the abstract:

Entrepreneurship has become a fast-growing subfield in management research, and is increasingly appearing in economics, finance, and even law. We survey a number of approaches to entrepreneurship in the economics and management literatures, and argue that modern research in this area need to be focused around ideas from Austrian economics and Frank Knight on entrepreneurial judgment. We critically discuss the recent opportunity discovery literature in management, and argue that it has partially misunderstood the Austrian origins of the theory, and fails to adequately distinguish between opportunity identification and opportunity exploitation.

UPDATE: You can also download the paper from SSRN.

| Nicolai Foss |

Suppose all capital were what Robert Solow called “Shmoo” (after a Lil’ Abner cartoon; check this for some Shmoo info), that is, a homogenous substance. In such a world, the (intertemporal) coordination problem deals only with selecting the intensity of the input services that must be supplied over time to match consumer preferences. All capital assets are substitutes, so there is no path-dependence. Asset prices are presumably instantaneously equilibrated. In such a world, there are no coordination problems and no Misesian “calculation” problems. Many decision problems disappear as there are no costs of inspecting, measuring, and monitoring the attributes of capital assets. Decision makers do not reach the bounds of their rationality. In sum, a world of homogeneous capital  is a world where there nothing (or very little) for entrepreneurs to do. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Jérémie Rostan has produced a study guide for Menger’s Principles of Economics, a nice complement to Bob Murphy’s study guides for Man, Economy, and State and Human Action (see the study guide links after each chapter title). And there’s always Percy Greaves’s Mises Made Easier.

When will someone write Foss Made Easier? I would buy a Foss Companion.

| Peter Klein |

Cass Sunstein asks if the blogosphere is more like Hayek’s spontaneous market order or Habermas’s noisy “bourgeois public sphere,” concluding that it isn’t quite either:

The rise of the blogosphere raises important questions about the elicitation and aggregation of information, and about democracy itself. Do blogs allow people to check information and correct errors? Can we understand the blogosphere as operating as a kind of marketplace for information along Hayekian terms? Or is it a vast public meeting of the kind that Jurgen Habermas describes? In this article, I argue that the blogosphere cannot be understood as a Hayekian means for gathering dispersed knowledge because it lacks any equivalent of the price system. I also argue that forces of polarization characterize the blogosphere as they do other social interactions, making it an unlikely venue for Habermasian deliberation, and perhaps leading to the creation of information cocoons. I conclude by briefly canvassing partial responses to the problem of polarization.

The paper is in the January 2008 issue of Public Choice, a special issue edited by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell on the social and political aspects of blogging. (Thanks to Greg Ransom for the link.)

| Peter Klein |

Open-source software is often cited as an example of what Hayek termed spontaneous order, the organic, bottom-up, decentralized form of organization that characterizes the market system. Giampaolo Garzarelli, in an explicitly Hayekian analyis, says open-source projects are defined by “no hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure.” Is this an accurate characterization?

Commercial law, manifest in the medieval law merchant or lex mercatoria, is another important example of spontaneous order in the literature (see Harold Berman and Bruce Benson). Fabrizio Marrella and Christopher Yoo use the law merchant as a benchmark, asking “Is Open Source Software the New Lex Mercatoria?”They think not, arguing that focal firms, individuals, and groups play a more important role in guiding the evolution of open-source projects than is usually recognized. As a result, “[o]pen source has not achieved the type of universality or uniformity of principles envisioned by proponents of the lex mercatoria.” (more…)

| Steve Phelan |

John Mathews recently sent me a conference paper on Kirznerian, Schumpeterian, and Ricardian approaches to entrepreneurial dynamics.

Aside from questioning the resource-based theory of entrepreneurship, the paper also attempts to resolve the Kirznerian/Schumpeterian schism in entrepreneurship — namely whether entrepreneurs drive the economy towards equilibrium (Kirzner) or disequilibrium (Schumpeter). (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Austrian economists have mixed views on Adam Smith and classical economics. Mises and Hayek admired Smith as a social theorist and system builder while rejecting much of his technical apparatus, especially the labor theory of value. Menger taught Smithian political economy to his most famous pupil, Crown Prince Rudolf. Rothbard considered Smith grossly overrated. More generally, Austrian economists have tended to distance themselves as much from the classical system as from its neoclassical descendant. (Kirzner’s review of George Reisman’s Capitalism, which tries to synthesize Austrian and Ricardian economics, is worth reading in this regard.)

A new paper by Michael Bradley argues that the distinction between classical and Austrian analysis is overdrawn, at least with regard to competition theory. (more…)

| Nicolai Foss |

Here is a possible research subject for a historian of ideas. The invention of pictograms is very often ascribed to Otto Neurath, Austrian philosopher (hardcore positivist) and political economist. Of course, pictograms go back much longer. For example, “A” is essentially a pictogram, namely the inverted head of a cow. Still, Neurath contributed very significantly in coming up with new designs for pictograms, designs that are still with us, codifying the art of the pictogram, disseminating and propagandizing for their use, etc.

Now, Neurath was a participant in the Böhm-Bawerk seminar, and a contemporary of Ludwig von Mises whom he clearly knew. Mises didn’t symphatize with Neurath’s view, and this lack of sympathy may have been reciprocated by Neurath. Still, it is at least conceivable that Mises’ views on prices as necessary for rational economic action may have influenced Neurath-the-inventor-of-the-pictogram (Mises’ views were formed and published before Neurath’s work on pictograms). Prices summarize information and provide direction in a complex world. Pictograms do the same. A possible connection?

| Steve Phelan |

Can someone with a solid macro background tell me if this paper supports Austrian monetary theory (or not)?

Relative Goods’ Prices and Pure Inflation, by Ricardo Reis and Mark W. Watson, NBER WP 13615, November 2007 [open link]:

Abstract: This paper uses a dynamic factor model for the quarterly changes in consumption goods’ prices to separate them into three components: idiosyncratic relative-price changes, aggregate relative-price changes, and changes in the unit of account. The model identifies a measure of “pure” inflation: the common component in goods’ inflation rates that has an equiproportional effect on all prices and is uncorrelated with relative price changes at all dates. The estimates of pure inflation and of the aggregate relative-price components allow us to re-examine three classic macro-correlations. First, we find that pure inflation accounts for 15-20% of the variability in overall inflation, so that most changes in inflation are associated with changes in goods’ relative prices. Second, we find that the Phillips correlation between inflation and measures of real activity essentially disappears once we control for goods’ relative-price changes. Third, we find that, at business-cycle frequencies, the correlation between inflation and money is close to zero, while the correlation with nominal interest rates is around 0.5, confirming previous findings on the link between monetary policy and inflation.

(HT: Mark Thoma at Economist’s View)

| Peter Klein |

In the Spring of 2005 I attended a terrific workshop on “The Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm,” organized by Sharon Alvarez and Jay Barney and held at Ohio State University. Participants included Mark Casson, Dick Langlois, Sid Winter, Ulrich Witt, Ivo Zander, Simon Parker, Todd Zenger, Steve Michael, Bill Schultze, and several others. The papers and discussions explored a variety of approaches for linking the theory of entrepreneurship to the economic and strategic theory of the firm, a subject near and dear to our hearts here at O&M.

The workshop papers have now been published as a special issue of the Journal of Management Studies (volume 44, number 7, November 2007), edited by Sharon and Jay. A special contribution from Brian Loasby, who wasn’t able to attend the workshop, is included. And don’t miss this paper from an unusually structured joint-spousal team.

| Steve Phelan |

I had an interesting encounter with two economists in my college last week. The first was during a presentation I was giving to the MBA Association on buying opportunities in Las Vegas following the subprime debacle. I assured the audience that buying opportunities existed but you needed to to be very knowledgeable about the area of town in which you intended to buy. The professor of economics who preceded me in the presentation immediately retorted, “if so many opportunities exist then why isn’t everybody buying?” (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Can anyone point me to biographical or bibliographical resources on Bert F. Hoselitz? He is known to Austrian economists as the translator (with James Dingwall) of Menger’s Principles of Economics, but he was also an accomplished Chicago development economist who founded the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change. He was trained in Vienna (according to this brief note) but did not apparently have much contact with the Austrian school. I’m particularly interested in Hoselitz’s contributions to entrepreneurship theory.

| Peter Klein |

At the Kauffman data symposium participants were given little notebooks with the Kauffman logo and a quote from Hayek — “Society’s course will be changed only by a change in ideas” — on the cover. It’s a nice line and certainly in the spirit of Hayek’s views on social change as expressed in The Road to Serfdom, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” and other works, though the exact quotation does not seem to appear in Hayek’s writings. (The line is attributed to Hayek by John Blundell, recounting a conversation between Hayek and IEA founder Antony Fisher. In “The Rediscovery of Freedom,” written in 1983, Hayek puts it this way: “A young English pilot who had returned from the war and had made a great deal of money in a few years as an entrepreneur came to me [around 1947] and asked me what he could do to thwart the ominous growth of socialism. I had considerable trouble persuading him that mass propaganda was futile and that the task consisted rather of convincing intellectuals.”)

The Kauffman Foundation focuses on entrepreneurship, not opposition to socialism, so I started thinking about the influence of Hayek on entrepreneurship research. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurial discovery builds directly on Hayek’s notion of an economy characterized by dispersed, tacit knowledge, an economy in which “competition” is a process of coordination and equilibration, rather than a set of conditions (as in Walrasian competitive general equilibrium). However, Hayek did not develop a theory of the entrepreneur per se. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Terence W. Hutchison, the iconoclastic British methodologist and historian of economic thought, died today. Hutchison’s Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) was an early and influential attempt to incorporate logical positivism into economic method. Frank Knight’s excellent 1940 article, “What is ‘Truth’ in Economics?” is framed as a reply to Hutchison. Hutchison later sparred with Fritz Machlup on Mises’s methodology; Murray Rothbard sided with Hutchison. I enjoyed parts of Hutchison’s The Politics and Philosophy of Economics: Marxians, Keynesians and Austrians (1981). And who can forget his distinction between “Hayek I” and “Hayek II”?

NB: In an otherwise favorable review of my edited volume, The Fortunes of Liberalism, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Mark Blaug took me to task for consistently misspelling Hutchison as “Hutchinson.” Good thing I left in that error to distract reviewers from the other errors!

| Peter Klein |

My review of Tony Yu’s Firms, Strategies, and Economic Change (Elgar, 2005) for the QJAE (volume 10, number 1, Spring 2007) is now online.

| Nicolai Foss |

O&M has featured a number of posts on uncertainty as a phenomenon that, in some sense, goes beyond risk. Contributors to these kind of discussions often delight in employing notions such as “Knightian uncertainty,” “genuine, real, true . . . uncertainty,” “the unlistability problem,” “surprise functions,” etc., and they debate whether so-called Knightian uncertainty really is inconsistent with a Bayesian perspective, whether Shackle’s notion of uncertainty is in some sense deeper than Knight’s, etc.

Much of the debate is, if perhaps not a quagmire, then certainly an area where conceptual clarification and some serious formal work would seem to be much needed (with respect to the latter, see this). Conceptual clarification may occasionally involve going back to important figures in the debates and consider what they (really) said. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Austrian economists eschew empirical analysis in favor of deductive, a priori reasoning. They don’t believe in prediction. Neoclassical economists, by contrast, endorse the “scientific method” of rigorous empirical testing. You know that, right?

Then you might be surprised to learn that Carl Menger (1840-1921), founder of the Austrian school, called his approach the “empirical method,” as distinguished from Léon Walras’s “rational method.” Menger was a prominent economic journalist before turning to scientific work and his primary interest, as a scholar, was to explain the actual pricing processes he observed in the marketplace, processes that did not at all resemble those described in contemporary textbooks. Menger’s purpose, writes Guido Hülsmann in Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism, was

to demonstrate that the properties and laws of economic phenomena result from these empirically ascertainable “elements of the human economy” such as individual human needs, individual human knowledge, ownership and acquisition of individual quantities of goods, time, and individual error. Menger’s great achievement in [Principles of Economics, 1871] consisted in identifying these elements for analysis and explaining how they cause more-complex market phenomena such as prices. He called this the “empirical method,” emphasizing that it was the same method that worked so well in the natural sciences. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

It’s Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect (mentioned previously here). Rosenzweig systematically, but politely, demolishes the pretensions of best-selling management books and projects such as In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, Good to Great, and the Evergreen Project. These studies, Rosenzweig patiently explains, engage not in serious research — despite their pseudo-scientific pretensions (what Rosenzweig calls “The Delusion of Rigorous Research”) — but in storytelling.

The most common problems are sampling on the dependent variable (i.e., choosing a sample of high-performing companies and explaining what their managers did, ignoring selection bias) and using independent variables based purely on respondents’ ex post subjective assessments of strategy, corporate culture, leadership, and other “soft” characteristics. The latter is the “Halo Effect” of the book’s title. When a company’s financial or operating performance is strong, managers, consultants, journalists, and management professors tend to rate strategy, culture, and leadership highly, while rating the same strategies, cultures, and leadership poorly when a company’s performance is weak. It’s as if the authors of “guru” books have never taken a first-year graduate course on empirical research design. Or, as Rosenzweig puts it (p. 128): “None of these studies is likely to win a blue ribbon at your local high school science fair.” Ouch. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Congratulations to Guido Hülsmann for the release of his 1,200-page biography of Ludwig von Mises, titled Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Buy a copy here or read the whole thing online here. I’ve just started and the early chapters are terrific, placing Mises’s scientific ideas in their turn-of-the-century Viennese context and emphasizing the Jewish roots of Mises’s liberal Weltanschauung. I can’t wait to read the rest.

| Nicolai Foss |

At the professional development workshop on “The Austrian School of Economics: Applications to Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship,” arranged by my co-blogger for this year’s Academy of Management Meetings, the first question raised from the audience after the presentations was the one in the heading to this post. (Fabio at orgtheory.net has also made related, ehhh, provocations, which we will deal with later here at O&M).

It wasn’t entirely clear what the person who asked the question meant, the acoustics in the room were terrible (he had to repeat the question twice), and I am sure that complex issues like the symmetry thesis were popping up in the minds of my co-panelists, so there was some hesitation in the panel to address the question. (Afterwards I learned that unfortunately this was taken by some audience members as an implicit admission that AE isn’t predictive).

The question was unclear because it could mean any of this: (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Sessions from the SDAE section of the upcoming Southern Economic Association annual meeting (New Orleans, 18-20 2007) that may interest our readers:

• Peter Lewin (University of Texas at Dallas) and Howard Baetjer Jr. (Towson University),“Can Ideas be Capital? Can Capital Be Anything Else?”
• Per-Olof Bjuggren and Johanna Palmberg (Jönköpings International Business School), “Swedish Listed Family Firms and Entrepreneurial Spirit”
• Joseph T. Salerno (Pace University), “The Entrepreneur: Real and Imagined” (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Israel Kirzner received the 2006 International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. Here is an article by Robin Douhan, Gunnar Eliasson, and Magnus Henrekson from the current issue of Small Business Economics summarizing Kirzner’s contributions to entrepreneurship theory.

| Peter Klein |

• The History of Political Philosophy: From Plato to Rothbard by former O&M guest blogger David Gordon. A ten-lecture series delivered in June 2007 covering Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Spooner, Spencer, Rawls, Nozick, Rothbard, and more. Only David Gordon could be an expert on all of these.
• Russ Roberts’s interview with Barry Weingast about the new book by North, Wallis, and Weingast, A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (what a title!). Weingast has become so prominent in political science it is easy to forget that he has an economics PhD (from Cal Tech) and started his career as an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. (His critics have not forgotten.)
• Fundamentals of Economic Analysis: A Causal-Realist Approach. Economics in the tradition of Carl Menger, starting with the basics of scarcity, choice, value, and exchange then moving to pricing, entrepreneurship, capital, competition, money, banking, and the business cycle. Joe Salerno and I give the lectures. You can also get these as videos in a handsome DVD set.

| Peter Klein |

You all know about Hayek-Klein day. Did you know today is Machlup-Klein day? Economist Fritz Machlup, student and friend of Ludwig von Mises, contemporary of F. A. Hayek, and mentor to Edith Penrose, was born 15 August 1902. My dad’s birthday is also today, August 15! What is it about Kleins and great Austrian economists?