Investment, information, and coordination of activities: the case of innovative investments.

Summary The paradox of productivity can be interpreted as the time lag between the installation of an innovation and its profitability. The innovation process must be described as a process inscribed in the time of construction and then of use of a productive capacity. The investment commitments made must then be represented by irreversible decisions confronted with a specific problem of cost recovery. The justification of the microfoundations must be preceded by an analysis of the commitment mechanisms of the innovation process. This thesis will focus on the description of the firm's commitment process in the face of multiple and progressive constraints linked to the nature of the innovation process: irreversibility, high uncertainty, cumulative commitments, intertemporal complementarity of factors, and coherence of agents' plans. The results show the existence of an irreversibility effect that only increases the discrepancy between revenues and expenditures. This is explained by the existence of the production detour set up by the firm during the construction of the innovation process. The firm must then organize and coordinate this production detour. The strategies of choice put in place by the firm, to this end, are centered on the role of market connections, and on the construction of a competition that proceeds from a "trial and error" discovery.