1704380277 8.If the development of the improvement or its implementation involved an indivisible fixed cost, then these costs would act as a threshold and improvements would not be made until they were sufficiently pro.table to cover the fixed costs.If, on the other hand, the costs were not necessarily a large lump sum and/or there was substantial heterogeneity in these costs, then the effect of greater profitability on inventive activity would be more continuous.In either case, the remainder principle explains why the process is sequential over a period of time.

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1704380279 9.Draper, “Continued Development.”

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1704380281 10.David Landes, in The Unbound Prometheus, described this pattern during the Industrial Revolution as one of “challenge and response” after Toynbee.

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1704380283 11.Baldwin and Clark, Design Rules.

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1704380285 12.Weavers were paid mainly on piece rates, so they would benefit directly from learning this skill.A weaver on an hourly rate would only benefit to the extent that her employer raised her pay for acquiring such skills.

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1704380287 13.Marx, Capital, vol.1, ch.15.

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1704380289 14.Autor, Levy, and Murnane, “Skill Content.”

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1704380291 15.This is why new inventions so often come from skilled workers and managers: there is “user innovation.” See Eric von Hippel, Sources of Innovation.

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1704380293 16.Thomson, “Learning by Selling.”

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1704380295 17.This topic is explored in Rosenberg, “Technological Interdependence.” The Corliss steam engine not only provided cheaper power, it also regulated the power supply in response to demand changes, which improved the ability to manufacture finer textiles.See Rosenberg and Trajtenberg, “General Purpose Technology.”

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1704380297 18.This output is based on the amount of cotton processed per textile worker, not just weavers.

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1704380299 19.Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip (and, roughly, the processor speed) doubles about every two years.Both the exponential growth in textiles and in semiconductors can be viewed as the outcome of a process of coordination between a base technology and complementary knowledge/products.

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1704380301 20.David, “The Dynamo and the Computer.”

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1704380303 21.Black and Lynch, “How to Compete”; Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt, “Information Technology”; Lynch, “Adoption and Diffusion.”

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1704380305 22.See Chapter 11, and Bessen and Maskin, “Sequential Innovation.”

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1704380307 第四章　标准知识

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1704380309 1.Students only needed to determine the atomic number of an element to determine its place in the periodic table, and from this they could infer chemical properties.For example, the rightmost column contains noble gases that are inert.The next to last column contains halogens that are highly reactive; they will combine with hydrogen to firm acids.

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1704380311 2.For example, Justus von Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen had a dozen students early on.See Haber, Chemical Industry, p.71.

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1704380313 3.Bensaude-Vincent, History of Chemistry.

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1704380315 4.Moser, “Do Patents Weaken the Localization of Innovations?”

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1704380317 5.Since the 1980s, economists have studied various aspects of technical standards, focusing mainly on compatibility standards, or those standards that allow different components of a system to work together, such as hardware and software.Compatibility standards give rise to interesting problems such as competition between standards and problems of “lock-in” to a given standard.But technical standards are only one way that technical knowledge is standardized, and these compatibility issues are only part of the role that technical standards play.For a review of this literature, see David and Greenstein, “Economics of Compatibility Standards,” and Blind, Economics of Standards.

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1704380319 6.Dominique Foray defines codification as “expressed in a particular language and recorded on a particular medium” (Foray, Economics of Knowledge,p.74).Foray reviews the literature on codification.Language puts knowledge in a standardized firm that can be more readily understood by someone who reads that language.But standardized knowledge is not necessarily codified; a tacit skill can be limited to apply to a certain range of conditions, thus becoming standardized to a degree.For instance, surgeons are certified in certain standard techniques that are tacit knowledge learned through experience.Codification is often most beneficial when it is combined with other sorts of standardization.Thus, although chemical experiments were all documented (codified) before Mendeleev, the experimental knowledge became much easier to learn when essential findings were simplified in the firm of the periodic table.Such simplification can make the knowledge easier to acquire.Although it’s not necessary, codification facilitates the ease with which knowledge can be standardized, and it magnifies the ease of communicating standardized knowledge.

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1704380321 7.The notion of dominant designs is developed in Utterback and Abernathy, “Dynamic Model”; Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics; and Suárez and Utterback, “Dominant Designs.” On QWERTY, see David, “Clio.”

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1704380323 8.Nelson and Winter, Evolutionary Theory.

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1704380325 9.See a review of this literature in Besen and Farrell, “Choosing How to Compete.”

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