Erik Lakomaa

Despite minimal formal barriers to entry, the Swedish food retail sector has remained highly concentrated for over seven decades. Since the 1950s, two dominant actors, the privately held ICA Group and the cooperative KF, have continuously controlled approximately 75 percent of the market and the big three over 90 %. This paper draws on extensive archival material from corporate and government sources to explore how this duopoly was maintained. It argues that ICA and KF employed a range of non-market strategies to preserve the existing market structure, including political lobbying, collusion with policymakers, preferential access to store locations, and influence over competition policy. These strategies exemplify a corporatist mode of regulation that helped insulate the sector from liberalizing pressures and structural change.

Research on market shaping has highlighted how firms actively transform their operating environments, yet most studies emphasize individual focal actors and contemporary contexts. This paper advances understanding of collaborative market shaping by theorizing the role of organizational hybridity and legitimizing boundary work as core mechanisms that enable collective strategies to emerge and diffuse across markets. We argue that organizational hybridity allows firms to balance autonomy with coordination, while legitimizing boundary work reframes collusive features as legitimate cooperation. Empirically, we analyze voluntary retail chains (VRCs) in Sweden between 1945 and 1975, drawing on nearly 2,700 archival documents and 38,000 pages of trade journals. We show how VRCs coordinated procurement, branding, and access to retail space, thereby reshaping the regulatory and competitive contours of multiple markets. Our findings expand the empirical and methodological base of market shaping research and highlight the value of historical analysis for understanding how firms navigate Knightian uncertainty.

During the 1960s and 1970s, several voluntary retail chains were started in Sweden; they quickly gained a significant market share in industries as diverse as home furnishings, sporting goods, and jewellery. The business model, however, is unusual today. The entrepreneur and advertising man Erik Elinder organized seven of these chains. Through access to unique source material from Erik Elinder's archive, we have had the opportunity to study the creation of these chains and compare how the concept was sold to the retailers and how the business models were adapted to different industries. The voluntary chains can be seen partly as a way to limit competition and partly as an adaptation to the unique conditions that prevailed in Sweden during a period of rapid urbanization, the establishment of new shopping centres, and the structural transformation of the retail trade.

This paper examines the role hobbyist communities play as a non-commercial counterpart to entrepreneurial industries. Drawing on historical examples, we show that hobbyist communities often play important roles in entrepreneurship. The communities are not merely a collection of users and user-makers but tightly knit knowledge commons with self-organized norms. Similar to entrepreneurial industries, hobbyist communities provide entrepreneurial support structures such as conventions, expos, and newsletters. However, the focus on intrinsic motivations in hobbyist communities can help mitigate the risk of opportunistically overselling motivations to unsuitable entrepreneurs, a problem often encountered in entrepreneurial industries. In contrast, hobbyist communities' distinct entrepreneurial culture and motivation attract different types of entrepreneurs. Such communities' organic emergence and self-organization also factor in public entrepreneurship policy, highlighting the limits of top-down planning.

Recent advances in generative AI promise to transform economic history by unlocking textual archives, quantifying complex historical concepts, and expanding the empirical toolkit. Yet these opportunities raise fundamental methodological questions. This paper evaluates large language models (LLMs) as tools for digital economic history, comparing their algorithmic foundations with core principles of historical scholarship. We identify three key areas of tension: compromised source criticism due to unclear data provenance, opacity in model training that hinders scholarly review, and probabilistic output that challenges reproducibility. We also diagnose two specific AI-related problems: the “secondary source paradigm,” in which LLMs rely on representations of texts rather than primary sources, and “AI intrusive thoughts,” or the inability of LLMs to respect historical temporality. While these limitations mean AI cannot replace human historical inquiry, we demonstrate practical ways in which it can augment it, such as contextual corpus searches, assistance with digitization workflows, and feedback on methodological framing. Drawing from applications in financial history and correspondence analysis, we propose five guidelines for the responsible and sustainable integration of AI tools into economic history research. The paper is especially relevant to researchers working in developing-country contexts, where archival gaps are common but methodological rigor remains essential. Our contribution bridges technical and historiographical perspectives to support responsible AI adoption in the field.

We examine the effect of historical banking crises on contemporary trust in banks. Using the 1870-2019 Banking Crisis database, we show that banking crises in the distant past continue to depress trust in banks. Trust can take long to recover from emotionally salient crises that become part of the collective memory, as banking crises often have. Over the long run, trust building and repair have not fully restored trust lost due to past crises. One cause may be vicious cycles in which distrust has an enduring negative impact on trust maintenance and repair capacity. In a low-trust environment, banks may reduce investment in building relational trust, instead relying on technology, monitoring, contracts, and institutional trust. Regulation and routine allow banking to continue in low-trust environments but do not recover lost relationship-based trust. The repeated nature of banking crises may cause trust repair tools to lose effectiveness over time. Even sincere attempts to repent and reform may appear as cheap talk in economies that suffer cumulative episodes of banking crises. Lastly, compared to other sectors, banking suffers from inherent problems in crisis management. The short-term pragmatic solution to limit the crisis is often bailing out culpable banks and bankers. However, the lack of sanctions for transgressors can harm longer-term trust repair. Trust in banks has a moral component, where trust falls not only due to the crisis itself but also the perception of injustice.

In connection with the Napoleonic wars, volunteer shooting clubs or militias, sometimes called “shooting guilds,” were founded in many European countries. These often later developed into sports organizations, sometimes with a preserved strong connection to the armed forces, sometimes without. In this paper, the Swedish Volunteer Shooting Association, also known as “The Sharpshooter movement,” is used as a case to describe the development of such organizations. Beginning with Finnish War in 1809, a number of militias or clubs emerged in Sweden. They were later organized under an independent umbrella organization, with joint volunteer and government control. The organization came to play a role in the defence of the Swedish realm until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The organization also played other societal functions, both social and political. The Sharpshooter movement also played an essential role in training competitive shooters and making sport shooting one of the largest sports in Sweden and one where Swedish athletes have proven very successful in many international championships. The paper contributes to the literature on total war, volunteer forces, and civilian-military cooperation. Using archives from the sharpshooter association, the armed forces, and historical media sources, it has been possible to describe the functioning of the association and isolate the critical junctures in the development of the sharpshooter movement. It was found that the Sharpshooter movement played an important role in the democratic movement at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century and in the Swedish Cold War defence strategy and the doctrine of “total defence”.