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Full-Text Articles in Law

Churn, Baby, Churn: Strategic Dynamics Among Dominant And Fringe Firms In A Segmented Industry, John M. De Figueiredo, Brian S. Silverman Jan 2007

Churn, Baby, Churn: Strategic Dynamics Among Dominant And Fringe Firms In A Segmented Industry, John M. De Figueiredo, Brian S. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

This paper integrates and extends the literatures on industry evolution and dominant firms to develop a dynamic theory of dominant and fringe competitive interaction in a segmented industry. It argues that a dominant firm, seeing contraction of growth in its current segment(s), enters new segments in which it can exploit its technological strengths, but that are sufficiently distant to avoid cannibalization. The dominant firm acts as a low-cost Stackelberg leader, driving down prices and triggering a sales takeoff in the new segment. We identify a “churn” effect associated with dominant firm entry: fringe firms that precede the dominant firm into …


“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk Jan 2007

“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk

Faculty Scholarship

A legal ideology emerged in the 1870s that celebrated contract as the body of law with the particular purpose of facilitating the formation of productive exchanges that would enrich the parties to the contract and, therefore, society as a whole. Across the spectrum of intellectual property, courts used the legal fiction of implied contract, and a version of it particularly emphasizing liberty of contract, to shift control of workplace knowledge from skilled employees to firms while suggesting that the emergence of hierarchical control and loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for creative workers was consistent with the free labor ideology that dominated …