IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/buspol/v19y2017i02p191-214_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Club goods, intellectual property rights, and profitability in the information economy†

Author

Listed:
  • Schwartz, Herman Mark

Abstract

Are club goods becoming more widespread in developed economies, and, if so, what is the broader significance of this trend? Club goods are as salient for the profitability of non-financial firms as for finance. First, corporate strategy today largely revolves around the generation or acquisition of intellectual property rights and other club/franchise goods. Second, financialization is not just about the credit relationship between financial firms on the one side and non-financial corporate and household borrowers on the other, but also about Main Street's ability to use financial power to suppress competition in its own markets. Third, firms’ strategic reliance on IPRs and club goods more generally has magnified both profit and wage inequality in the broader economy. This inequality combines with changes in corporate structure to produce a significant part of the household level income inequality we currently observe in the United States. Fourth, all these processes are ineluctably political, because the state necessarily constitutes club or franchise goods, just like any property right. But the quantity and quality of those property rights is an indeterminate outcome of struggles among firms over the size of and shares of the pool of profits in a given national and global economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Schwartz, Herman Mark, 2017. "Club goods, intellectual property rights, and profitability in the information economy†," Business and Politics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 19(2), pages 191-214, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:buspol:v:19:y:2017:i:02:p:191-214_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1469356916000112/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Susan K. Sell, 2020. "What COVID-19 Reveals About Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity," Development, Palgrave Macmillan;Society for International Deveopment, vol. 63(2), pages 150-156, December.
    2. Ugo Pagano & Maria Alessandra Rossi, 2019. "Come sorridere anche noi: Sviluppo economico, accesso alle conoscenze, e riduzione delle diseguaglianze," Department of Economics University of Siena 803, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
    3. Susan K. Sell, 2021. "21st Century Capitalism and Innovation for Health," Global Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 12(S6), pages 12-20, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:buspol:v:19:y:2017:i:02:p:191-214_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/bap .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.