I forgot to mention one, focused as I was on business in isolation. r's tend to thrive in areas where there's a slew of complex regulations which can be negotiated through like a complex social hierarchy. K's, I suspect, are more at home in an environment of simple laws that say what they mean and mean what they say.
Have you spent some time poking through libertarian theory and Austrian economics? One of their major themes is: economic competition, when viewed in the global sense, is another kind of social co-operation. They're also big on pointing out that a lot of business competition consists of finding niches with new products: in essence, competing for consumer dollars without competing directly.
But on the other hand, the Rothbardian segment insists that the current regulations on banks should be replaced by one simple law that's much tougher than the current set-up: 100% reserves on demand deposits. Anything more lenient, they consider to be encouragement of fraud. The 100%-reserv'ers consider this point to be non-negotiable.
To get back to regulations, the regulatory State provides a big advantage to r's because of how it grew. The legislators discovered a principle that computer programmers didn't discover until 1990 or so: the more user-friendly the application, the more back coding is needed to make it work properly. With respect to legislation, the "back coding" is a combination of implementary regulations and amendments that make the original law much more complex - like, most notoriously, the Internal Revenue Code.
Yeah, there is a fine line between creativity in competiting, and avoiding competition.
One of the things which I think differentiates r-competing is a willignness to use K’s against other K’s, as proxies. Whether it is a Lib hiding behind the tax man, a gungrabber hiding behind a fed, or a hippie siding with the communists, each is seeking to use another K/warrior as a proxy to attack their real competition, without facing them directly. This breaking of rules we view as sacrosanct is why they are so vexing.
“One of their major themes is: economic competition, when viewed in the global sense, is another kind of social co-operation. “
It is what I think K-selection has always been. Taking allies to cooperate socially, but only in order to compete for limtied resources, and take them from others, who will have to do without. So it is cooperative, but only to be competitive. I believe that is why cooperation evolved. We had to cooperate to compete, or we would easily be killed by others who cooperated. The best cooperators were the ones who survived, by killing off everyone else.
Unfortuantely, I am almost certianly not as bright as you are in economics though, so I can’t contribute much to you there. But if you get the basics on the biology side, which you clearly do, I suspect you won’t need my help anyway.