Kirzner at 50: Putting Competition Back in “Competition and Entrepreneurship"

Israel Kirzner’s “Competition and Entrepreneurship” was published fifty years ago this year. In that half-century, many scholars in entrepreneurship and strategic management have built on and criticized his conception of the entrepreneur. However, Kirzner himself saw the work as an explanation of the nature of competition and the entrepreneur’s role in the competitive market process. The panel will discuss the role of competition in Kirzner’s work and what that means for management and strategy scholars today. More importantly, the panel will discuss what we know today about the nature of competition that Kirzner missed and what Kirzner knew that subsequent scholars have yet to appreciate. Kirzner was responding to a structure-conduct-performance paradigm within industrial organization and an Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium model, both of which dominated economics research in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, research connected to Kirzner’s ideas is quite different and spans many more fields. Game theory, evolutionary theory, and simulations are much more prevalent in economics journals. Empirical and policy research is much more micro and digs into the details of how firms and markets organize. Strategy and entrepreneurship scholars increasingly emphasize time, process, uncertainty and judgment, dynamic competition, temporary advantage, and Schumpeterian evolution. With these developments in mind, the panel will discuss the following questions and more: • How has our understanding of competition grown since 1973? • In which ways did Kirzner anticipate subsequent research that moved away from static general equilibrium theorizing? • What insights did Kirzner contribute that we haven’t incorporated yet?