IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/sbusec/v21y2003i3p243-56.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Technological and Organisational Explanation for the Size Distribution of Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Gans, Joshua S
  • Quiggin, John

Abstract

This paper combines insights from the literature on the economics of organisation with traditional models of market structure to construct a theory of equilibrium firm size heterogeneity under the assumption of a homogenous product industry. It is possible that configurations consisting entirely of small firms (run by entrepreneurs with limited attention) and with larger firms (using managerial techniques to substitute away these limits to allow increasing returns technologies to become profitable) can arise in equilibrium. However, there also exist equilibrium configurations with the co-existence of large and small firms. The efficiency properties of these respective equilibria are discussed. Finally, the implications of an expanding market size are considered. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Suggested Citation

  • Gans, Joshua S & Quiggin, John, 2003. "A Technological and Organisational Explanation for the Size Distribution of Firms," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 21(3), pages 243-256, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:21:y:2003:i:3:p:243-56
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0921-898X/contents
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Andrikopoulos, A. & Dassiou, X., 2018. "Exchange-rate exposure in a “Rule of Three” Model," Working Papers 18/02, Department of Economics, City University London.
    2. Murat ATAN & Emre BOZDAĞ, 2011. "Avrupa Karbonatlı İçecekler Piyasasında Firma Büyüklüğü Ve Büyüklük Genişleme Oranı İlişkisi," Ekonomik Yaklasim, Ekonomik Yaklasim Association, vol. 22(80), pages 19-38.
    3. Harvie, Charles & Lee, Boon-Chye, 2003. "Public Policy and Small and Medium Enterprise Development," Economics Working Papers wp03-18, School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
    4. Martin C. Byford & Joshua S. Gans, 2014. "Permission to Exist," NBER Working Papers 20512, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Soumyananda Dinda & Arijit Mukherjee, 2014. "A Note on the Adverse Effect of Competition on Consumers," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 16(1), pages 157-163, February.
    6. Wang, Leonard F.S. & Mukherjee, Arijit, 2012. "Undesirable competition," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 175-177.

    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:kap:sbusec:v:21:y:2003:i:3:p:243-56. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.