Giovanni Dosi is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. He is the Co-Director of the task forces “Industrial Policy” and “Intellectual Property” at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. Dosi is Continental European Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change. Included in ISI Highly Cited Researchers.
His major research areas, where he is author and editor of several works, include economics of innovation and technological change, industrial organization and industrial dynamics, theory of the firm and corporate governance, evolutionary theory, economic growth and development.
A selection of his works has been published in two volumes: Innovation, Organization and Economic Dynamics. Selected Essays, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2000; and Economic Organization, Industrial Dynamics and Development: Selected Essays, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2012.
Economic analysis
Giovanni Dosi's economic analysis is characterized by the contemporaneous attempt to (i) identify empirical regularities and (ii) provide micro-foundations consistent with such regularities. As such, his work is a mix of statistical investigations and theoretical efforts.
Stylized facts
Throughout his work Dosi and his co-authors have identified some stylized facts as being especially relevant for economic analysis, among others:
S.F.1 Over the 19th-20th century technological innovation has proved to be the major contributor to the economic growth of countries, whose growth rates have however displayed an expanding variance.
S.F.2 The learning processes that firms undertake to carry out innovations are characterized by trials, errors and unexpected success.
S.F.3 Firms are highly heterogeneous in terms of sizes, productivities, and profitabilities. In particular, firm sizes display stationary skewed distributions, while productivities and profitabilities display stationary wide supports of their fat tailed distributions.
These facts have led Dosi to point out some theoretical implications, which raise contradictions within Neoclassical economics and bear favorable witness to Evolutionary economics.
Technical change
The role of technological progress as an explanation of contemporary economic growth (S.F.1) has led Dosi to carefully analyze the nature of technology. In particular, he has suggested an interpretation of technical change resting on the concepts of technological paradigm and technology trajectory.
In analogy with Thomas Kuhn's definition of a scientific paradigm, Dosi has defined a technological paradigm as the general outlook on the productive problems faced by firms. As such, a technological paradigm is composed by some sort of model of the technology at stake (e.g. the model of a microprocessor) and by the specific technological problems posed by such model (e.g. increasing computational capacity, reducing dimensions, etc.). Therefore, technology is identified as a problem-solving activity in which the problems to be solved are selected by the paradigm itself. In this sense, a technological paradigm entails strong prescriptions on the direction of technological change, that is the direction toward which future technical improvements will converge. Such gradual improvements along the specific lines prescribed by the paradigm are what constitute technological trajectories and progress.
Such interpretation of technological change brings Dosi to identify a limited influence of market signals on the direction of technological change. More precisely, in his view relative prices might affect the direction of technological change only within the boundaries defined by the nature of the technological paradigm. Such idea can be better understood by analyzing the effect of market signals in their two possible directions: moving "downstream" (i.e. from the technology to the sale of goods) and "upstream" (i.e. from the market environment to the technology).