Micro-Founded Institutions and Macro-Founded Individuals: The Dual Nature of Profit

Abstract

Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always due to the collective undertaking of non additively separable human capital investments, this paper introduces a theory of the institutional structure of production where groups are taken as units of analysis in a multi-level competition framework inspired by Marx’s critique of the ‘abstract man’. The main result is that monopoly profit is not the only meaningful notion of profit besides the value of individual contribution and, as a consequence, freeentry and competition do not necessarily wipe it outvalue, power, conflict, competition, social classes