- Big Business in China
- Sherman Cochran
- Hardcover 1980
- Creative Industries
- Richard E. Caves
- This book explores the organization of creative industries, including the visual and performing arts, movies, theater, sound recordings, and book publishing. In each, artistic inputs are combined with other, "humdrum" inputs. But the deals that bring these inputs together are inherently problematic: artists have strong views; the muse whispers erratically; and consumer approval remains highly uncertain until all costs have been incurred. To explain the logic of these arrangements, the author draws on the analytical resources of industrial economics and the theory of contracts.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Family Capitalism
- Harold James
- In Family Capitalism, Harold James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."
- Hardcover 2006
- Switching Channels
- Richard E. Caves
- Media critics invariably disparage the quality of programming produced by the U.S. television industry. But why the industry produces what it does is a question largely unasked. It is this question, at the crux of American popular culture, that Switching Channels explores.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Tyranny of the Market
- Joel Waldfogel
- Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a "tyranny of the majority." Markets, by contrast, are believed to make products available to suit any individual, regardless of what others want. But the argument is not generally correct. In markets, you can't always get what you want. This book explores why this is so and its consequences for consumers with atypical preferences.
- Hardcover 2007