Industrial Market Structure And Economic Performance

This text has been revised to reflect theoretical, empirical, and policy developments of the past decade. New insights into strategic behaviour from game theory are given attention. The chapters on antitrust policy have been integrated with the related theoretical materials.

Provides a systematic presentation of the economic field of industrial organization, which is concerned with how productive activities are brought into harmony with the demand for goods and services through an organizing mechanism, such as a free market, and how variations and imperfections in the organizing mechanism affect the successful satisfying of an economy's wants. Of the three market mechanisms (tradition, central planning, and free markets), the field of industrial organization deals primarily with the market system approach. This book primarily emphasizes the manufacturing and mineral extraction sectors of industrialized economies, with less discussion of wholesale and retail distribution, services, transportation, and public utilities. Beginning with a discussion of the welfare economics of competition and monopoly, the structure of industries in the U.S. and abroad and their determinants are described, including motives for mergers and their effects. Extended analysis of pricing, product policy, and technological innovation then follows. Antitrust, price fixing, related restraints, structural monopolies, regulation, and price discrimination are examined, as are the complex policies governing pricing relationships between vertically linked firms. The role of advertising in product differentiation and the roles of market structure and product variety are identified. Innovation, patents, and their relation to market structure are explored. Overall, this analysis seeks to identify attributes or variables that influence economic performance and to build theories about the links between these attributes and end performance. (TNM).

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As most economies remain caught in a global recession, that shows little sign of abatement, the importance of maintaining a flourishing industrial sector for the economic wellbeing of a country has rarely been so relevant. Industrial Organisation has long served as a basic introduction to this subject. The book is concerned with economic problems and policy issues that arise from the activities of firms. The authors reject the traditional micro-economic analysis of market structure in favour of studying conduct and performance in the context of macro-economic policy and the environment which this provides for firms. Substantially revised and updated to take account of developments in the subject since the publication of the last edition, Industrial Organization includes four new chapters which reflect the major new areas of interest in industrial economics over the last decade. These include the increasing importance of the service sector and problems of relatively low productivity growth within this, and questions relating to increased levels of international competition in a more open world economy. This is a comparative study, drawing on empirical evidence from the UK, USA and the EC. Mathematical and econometric requirements are kept to a minimum, and the text has long been regarded as the most accessible introduction to the subject.