My research interest is in organization and political economy as well as in philosophy. In organization I am primarily interested in issues involving the firm, entrepreneurship, collective action and the role and diffusion of knowledge; in political economy my interest involves market institutions such as contracts and property rights and the effects of political and legal interventions in the market; in philosophy I am particularly interested in the arguments for property as well as the conflict between liberty and coercion, along with moral philosophy and ethics.

I am currently working on my dissertation proposal, which elaborates on the theory of the firm and entrepreneurship from a distinct market or division of labor perspective. It is my conjecture that the firm is (was originally) a pure market institution providing an important function to the market as a whole, rather than being distinct from the market in the Coasean sense. The dissertation targets the division of labor (specialization and co-specialization of factors) as explanans for the emergence (existence) of firms in the economic-theoretical free market (what Coase refers to as “atomistic competition”).

I also establish a way to identify the boundaries of the firm using the same explanatory variable(s) and reasoning, and analyze the internal organization of the firm in terms of original and proxy-entrepreneurship (original and derived judgment). I believe the arrangement and specialization of resources in the division of labor, both in the market and within the firm, is an important factor that sadly has been neglected for many decades and omitted from modern theories of the firm. My dissertation shows that using the division of labor to explain organization in the market is a viable theoretical path and that there is much to gain from adopting this approach.

The dissertation will develop a theoretical approach to studying firms as products of purposeful division of labor by imaginative entrepreneurs; develop a model and conduct simulation through agent-based modeling to show the evolution of market organization into firm-based production; and show in a case study that specialization and co-specialization of factors explains phenomena that are basically unexplainable utilizing a transaction cost approach.

I have previously worked on defining the firm from a network theory perspective. I have also tried to identify the role of entrepreneurship and Knightian uncertainty in scientific progress, especially in the scientific method of Paul Feyerabend, and looked at the role of information and knowledge in the entrepreneurial market process, political entrepreneurship, and a possible solution to collective action problems in large groups and entrepreneurial communities.