Abstract/Summary

Entrepreneurship studies has an uneasy relationship with mainstream economics. This paper attempts to bridge the gap by presenting a formal mathematical theory of entrepreneurship, focusing in competing entrepreneurs operating in a segmented market. The entrepreneur is modelled as an innovative market-maker, discovering opportunities for trade, Each market segment is characterised by a maximum price that customers are willing to pay, and a quantity that they are willing to buy at that maximum price. The model can solve for the outcome of complicated market structures using a simple technique, namely linear progaramming.