Information and Co-ordination in an Effective Competitive Process

The task of the present chapter is to show that the problems of market coordination posed by Richardson are at least partially met by an evolutionary approach which recognises proprietary information, the passing of historical time and non-homogeneous expectations. This was demonstrated as early as Jack Downie’s work The Competitive Process, also emanating from Oxford in the 1950s. Downie shared with Richardson not only a scepticism of Cambridge microeconomics, but also many of the solutions to the problems inherent in that orthodoxy. My argument will be that Richardson saw fundamental problems in the emerging neoclassical orthodoxy, while Downie presented a potential solution by replacing it with an alternative. While Richardson posed a problem and Downie at least implicitly suggested a solution all those years ago, the profession has chosen to examine either the problem or potential solutions only relatively recently. ²