Conclusion

This OpenLearn course set out to show you how economics is often a discipline with a multitude of perspectives and traditions that go beyond mainstream economics.

You have explored the economic arguments in favour and against market power, the difference between price and innovation competition, and how different schools of thought theorise their importance. You also learned that firms with market power can engage in anticompetitive behaviour and use their competitive advantage to deter competition, and how regulators work to prevent this behaviour.

You have also learned about the current debates around the extent to which the digital economy requires regulation to keep it competitive; and how two particular theories can help understand it: intellectual monopoly capital and network effects. You were introduced to the Schumpeter and Arrow debate, and reasons why economists can’t agree on the best strategy to incentivise innovation.

Finally, you also engaged with the resource-based view of the firm to understand conglomerate formation, and how the new challenges of promoting competition and innovation that arise in the digital economy works and the authorities’ reaction to it.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD320: Doing economics: inequalities, innovation and environment.