The Theory of Business Strategy

Abstract

* The field of industrial organization has been transformed during the past twenty years. In the 1950s and 1960s, I.O. was predominantly an empirical field with little theory to guide either industry analysis or cross-section regression studies. During the 1980s, by contrast, there has been an intense flurry of activity in I.O. devoted to the development of new theory. This new wave of research consists almost exclusively of game-theoretic studies of behavior and performance in imperfectly competitive markets. In his companion piece Franklin Fisher argues that the game-theoretic approach to industrial organization has been unsuccessful. My aim here is to provide one participant's view of what industrial organization economists have learned from the recent theoretical research and where the field of industrial organization should go during the 1990s.