Escape from Equilibrium: Thinking Historically about Firm Responses to Competition
本文从历史视角分析企业应对竞争的策略，包括创新、政治操纵和直接限制竞争，指出合并与合谋等行为在当代市场依然活跃，对经济学和商业研究者有参考价值。
Firms use a variety of strategies to limit competition that would otherwise erode profits. Firms innovate, creating new technologies, new markets, and new firms. Innovations allow them to distinguish their products or lower their costs and thus maintain profits. Their ability to innovate depends on the existence of social institutions that allow them to amass the resources—labor, capital, and information—necessary to compete successfully. Firms also maintain profits by manipulating the political process to maintain preferred access to markets, technology and resources. Finally, firms take actions to limit competition directly. Waves of consolidation, justified by an assumption of the inevitability of increasing firm size, have limited competition and entrepreneurship. Cartels and other forms of collusion, sometimes thought to have disappeared from US markets after the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, are still active in a wide variety of national and international markets.