IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/esi/evopap/2011-06.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competition as an Ambiguous Discovery Procedure: A Reappraisal of Hayek's Epistemic Market Liberalism

Author

Listed:
  • Ulrich Witt

Abstract

Epistemic arguments play a significant role in Hayek's defense of market liberalism. His claim that market competition is a discovery procedure that serves the common good is a case in point. The hypothesis of the markets' efficient use of existing knowledge is supplemented by the idea that markets are also most effectively creating new knowledge. However, in his assessment Hayek neglects the role of new technological knowledge. He ignores that the discovery procedure induces not only price and cost competition but also competition by innovations. Thence he overlooks the ambiguity that follows from the unpredictability of the consequences of innovations. This fact is shown to challenge the epistemic foundations and the stringency of Hayek's version of market liberalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Ulrich Witt, 2011. "Competition as an Ambiguous Discovery Procedure: A Reappraisal of Hayek's Epistemic Market Liberalism," Papers on Economics and Evolution 2011-06, Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography.
    • Handle: RePEc:esi:evopap:2011-06
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: ftp://137.248.191.199/RePEc/esi/discussionpapers/2011-06.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Naomi Beck, 2015. "The garden of orderly polity: F. A. Hayek and T. H. Huxley’s views on social evolution," Journal of Bioeconomics, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 83-96, April.
    2. Rinaldo Evangelista, 2018. "Technology and Economic Development: The Schumpeterian Legacy," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 50(1), pages 136-153, March.
    3. Burak Erkut, 2016. "Perceiving Innovation: Who ‘Makes’ SAP Labs India and How?," South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases, , vol. 5(1), pages 116-125, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    competition; innovation; liberalism; knowledge; self-organization; Hayek Length 15 pages;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B25 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Historical; Institutional; Evolutionary; Austrian; Stockholm School
    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:esi:evopap:2011-06. 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: Christoph Mengs (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vamarde.html .

    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.