The Economics of Imperfect Competition: A Spatial Approach

This book takes a new approach to traditional price theory and to the analysis of imperfect competition. It represents a breakthrough in the development of a ‘new’ microeconomic theory. Increasingly, it has been recognized that the perfectly competitive paradigm is inappropriate to the explanation of pricing behaviour in many ‘real life’ markets characterized by a significant separation between producers and consumers. The spatial perspective adopted by the authors provides a natural separation of markets, but provides as well a powerful analogy for apparently nonspatial issues such as product differentiation, pricing over time, problems of storage and transportation, and the economics of intraindustry trade and of the multinational enterprise. A major concern of The Economics of Imperfect Competition: A Spatial Approach is to make these analogies explicit by applying this spatial analysis to a wide variety of nonspatial problems. In addition, the analysis and results presented in this book are shown to carry signficant policy implications with respect, for example, to the Robinson-Patman legislation, antimerger policies, and antidumping legislation. In particular, the authors have addressed issues that are of increasing concern to specialists, researchers, policy makers, and students in the areas of price theory, industrial organization, international trade, and regional and urban economics.