The Entrepreneurial Market Process-An Exposition

The title of this article embraces three implicit, distinct claims: (i) that market phenomena are governed by definite chains of cause and effect, (ii) that these chains of cause and effect constitute and generate a definite process, and (iii) that what drives this systematic process is (not the pattern of mutual constraints which reflect the maximizing decisions of market participants, but) the outside-the-box, "daring," hunches of entrepreneurs. The first of these three claims are fully consistent with the central thrust of economic science for over two centuries. The second of these claims will require us to clarify what we mean by "process." The third of these claims challenges, as we shall see, the conventional wisdom of mainstream micro-economic thought of the past century.