Allocation of Economic Competence in Teams: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

Attention is called to a little explored scarce resource, named 'economic competence', which combines features of human capital and bounded rationality, and can be defined as the non-transferable ('tacit') abilities of economic agents to employ transferable information for deciding about the use of scarce resources, including economic competence itself. An economy's performance is shown to strongly depend on how this resource i allocated, which in turn strongly depends upon the economy's institutions ('rules of the game'). Three stylized institutional alternatives are compared for their short-term and long-term effects upon the output and growth of a perfect team economy. The results throw new light on the social value of financial markets and the limitations of industrial policies.