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terça-feira, agosto 07, 2012

O triunfo da heterogeneidade

Ontem, durante o meu jogging, ao reflectir sobre o que tinha lido no capítulo 1 ("The Economics of Strategic Diversity") de "Astute Competition - The Economics of Strategic Diversity" de Peter Johnson, interroguei-me sobre o impacte dos economistas na economia do país.
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Que impacte terá uma classe educada, moldada, condicionada a pensar em termos de competição perfeita, monopólios, oligopólios, em suma, commodities... aqueles que conseguem, através do contacto com a realidade, partir o molde são uns heróis.
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Agora, percebo melhor a ênfase nos custos e, sobretudo, a visão redutora de olhar para um sector económico como um bloco homogéneo onde todos competem da mesma maneira, ou seja, pelo preço.
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Por isso, Daniel Bessa e os seus pares são incapazes de perceber o real, eles falam de mercado, e na realidade o que existem são seres vivos únicos, não matematizáveis, as empresas... e como prova da sociedade de vácuo e espuma em que vivemos, apesar de falharem uma e outra vez nas previsões, continuam a ser convidados para descrever a realidade e continuar a fazer previsões.
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Por isso, o mainstream fica admirado com a resiliência da economia real e das empresas reais, e só concebe uma explicação o preço, neste caso a cotação do euro (aqui e aqui).
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Por isso, a tríade, como lhes chamo há muito tempo, olha para um sector económico como um bloco homogéneo coerente, maciço... quando a realidade é saudavelmente heterogénea. Heterogeneidade entre empresas é o equivalente à biodiversidade na biologia, nos ecossistemas. O melhor seguro contra as catástrofes!!!
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"Contemporary neoclassical economics does not provide an adequate account of the competition between diverse businesses.
Nowhere though do we encounter a business as the object of investigation in traditional economics. In other words, there is a huge gap in the economics coverage of commercial activity. Why is this? Part of the reason is that the focus of economists is on markets rather than on businesses.
Management and strategy seem to have little importance: notionally at least, we could optimise the production function with but a few hours of linear programming.
Businesses get things done, facilitating intent and action in a way that is fundamentally beyond the scope of the market mechanism. We can consider businesses to be the vehicle to extract economic rents through the competitive control of resources; they are the building blocks of heterogeneous competition.
Like people, businesses are unique and the teams working in them expect strategies to reflect the specifics of the business, not averages or generalisations drawn across a large number of other businesses, which are each in fact distinct. Furthermore, businesses like individuals learn and adapt, (Moi ici: Por isso, o pensamento newtoniano de causa-efeitos eternos e imutáveis não funciona) particularly in the light of generally held assumptions about how businesses behave or conform to expectations. In talking to the key individuals in a business, it soon becomes apparent that heterogeneity is the key to generating returns different from those of competitors. Richard Rumelt got it right when he said:
Similar firms facing similar strategic problems may respond differently.
Firms in the same industry compete with substantially different bundles of resources using disparate approaches. These firms differ because of different histories of strategic choice  (Moi ici: A lição do espaço de Minkowsky, aqui tambémand performance and because managements appear to seek asymmetric competitive positions. (Foss 1997: 132)
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Economics heads in the opposite direction since it is determined to eliminate or render irrelevant the specifics of the individual situation. (Moi ici: Bem me parecia a mim, anónimo engenheiro de província, que era assim que os economistas viam a coisa, mas pensava que era defeito. Afinal é feitio) As a result, markets are the antithesis of businesses — all the non-systematic, business-specific information is washed away in the economists’ assumption of efficient and deep product markets: this is what transactional cost economics tells us happens when markets function well. The transactions are nominally the same and as a result individual businesses are not relevant to the making of purchasing decisions because they all offer whatever it is that the market provides. But this emphasis on anonymity in economics goes beyond the featureless neutrality of markets.
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The entire approach of traditional economics is to try to introduce homogeneous elements to make a situation tractable — essentially various forms of everything else being assumed to be the same — in order to establish a general conclusion of the form ‘whenever we have X, then Y follows’. More fully, though, we should say that ‘whenever we have two situations that only differ in so far as X occurs in one and does not in the other, then Y will occur in the situation that X occurs’. This uniformity of background assumption is generally known as the ceteris paribus assumption e.g. same product, same production processes, same customer needs. In real business situations, it is extremely rare for conditions to repeat themselves, in other words, for ceteris paribus to hold.
In a similar fashion, the force of ceteris paribus thinking extends to the way economists think about the businesses themselves. Traditional economic analyses of business problems show little understanding of the heterogeneous internal structure of businesses that result from their selection of business model.
While Michael Porter and other industrial organisation theorists perceive the existence of cost- and value based sources of competitive advantage, they are not able to link in a specific way these advantages to the configuration of the firm. The typical assumption is that the differences relate either to economies of scale and scope, or to operational efficiency.
Very little attention is given to differentiated internal structures since this undermines the powerful underlying requirement that competing businesses are relevantly similar, permitting the application of ceteris paribus thinking.
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It is easy to suspect that traditional economists cannot in fact explain how businesses make a sustained profit. In a world of perfect competition supernormal profits will be zero, and the suggestion of economics is that anything other than this outcome is either inefficient, transient or morally reprehensible. This failure to understand the source of sustained business profits probably arises from the focus of traditional economics on only three types of competition (monopoly, oligopoly and perfect competition — all of which are selected and investigated because they are susceptible to mathematical analysis) and associated rents.
Economists also tend to regard differentiation within a product or service as a variant of price, when in fact price may not be a criterion that determines purchase.
We find that often a reasonable price, not necessarily the best price, is a threshold requirement for a product or service to be bought; however, the dominant criterion that triggers a purchase decision relates to aesthetics, ease-of-use, name recognition or some other set of considerations.
When we turn to the basis of competition between businesses, economists usually assume that strategic positioning problems are essentially pricing problems, and this single price variable entirely captures the decision criteria of the purchaser."