Canadian Biotechnology Start-Ups, 1991–1997: The Role of Incumbents'' Patents and Strategic Alliances in Controlling Competition

Fligstein (1996) contends that organizations act to exploit the institutional context in which they are embedded so as to stabilize the competition they face. Drawing on Fligstein's theoretical analysis, we conceptualize incumbent biotechnology firms' patenting and alliance-building activities as attempts to stabilize and control potential competition and analyze how these activities shape rates of founding in the Canadian biotechnology industry. We find that increases in the level and concentration of incumbents' patenting discourage founding, particularly in human application sectors of the industry where development and approval processes are more costly and time consuming. Incumbents' horizontal alliances depress start-ups; vertical alliances stimulate start-ups. Our findings highlight how technology appropriation and strategic alliances structure the competitive dynamics and evolution of high-technology, knowledge-intensive industries.     

“Status! Yes!”: Tom Wolfe as a sociological thinker

The journalist Tom Wolfe draws heavily upon sociology in his works, yet sociologists have largely ignored his writings. This article argues that Wolfe’s journalism presents a coherent vision of contemporary society which emphasizes the importance of what has become a neglected sociological concept—status. Wolfe argues that economic expansion after World War II fostered the emergence of new “statusspheres,” and encouraged status competition. Wolfe treats issues of religion, character, and politics within the framework of status. His work should remind sociologists of the importance of status and the role of irony as a stance for sociological analysis. The author thanks Anne Bowler, Kathleen Lowney, and Lawrence T. Nichols for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Selecting Cheap‐Talk Equilibria

There are typically multiple equilibrium outcomes in the Crawford–Sobel (CS) model of strategic information transmission. This paper identifies a simple condition on equilibrium payoffs, called NITS (no incentive to separate), that selects among CS equilibria. Under a commonly used regularity condition, only the equilibrium with the maximal number of induced actions satisfies NITS. We discuss various justifications for NITS, including perturbed cheap‐talk games with nonstrategic players or costly lying. We also apply NITS to other models of cheap talk, illustrating its potential beyond the CS framework.     

Estimating discount rates for environmental quality from utility-based choice experiments

We estimate rates of time preference using a utility-based choice experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,914 respondents. For the full sample, the rate of time preference is very high for immediate benefits and drops off substantially thereafter, which is inconsistent with exponential discounting but consistent with hyperbolic discounting. Estimates of the hyperbolic discounting parameter range from 0.48 to 0.61. Visitors to water bodies have low rates of discount but exhibit hyperbolic discounting, whereas those who do not visit have consistently high rates of discount and low valuations of water quality.     

Limited liability and its moral hazard implications: the systemic inscription of instability in contemporary capitalism

The principle of limited liability is one of the defining characteristics of modern corporate capitalism. It is also, we argue in this article, a powerful structural source of moral hazard. Engaging in a double conceptual genealogy, we investigate how the concepts of moral hazard and limited liability have evolved and diffused over time. We highlight two parallel but unconnected paths of construction, diffusion, moral contestation, and eventual institutionalization. We bring to the fore clear elective affinities between both concepts and their respective evolution. Going one step further, we suggest that both concepts have come to be connected through time. In the context of contemporary capitalism, limited liability has to be understood, we argue, as a powerful structural source of moral hazard. In conclusion, we propose that this structural link between limited liability and moral hazard is an important explanatory factor of the systemic instability of contemporary capitalism and, as a consequence, of a pattern of recurrent crises that are regularly disrupting our economies and societies.