This book, first published in 1948, examines four industries studied as part of the Nuffield College Reconstruction Survey, begun in 1941. These studies, despite their apparent diversity, have a number of features in common. One is geography, and another, more pressing, is the relation of industry to the Government and the public. The studies serve as part of the historical background of reconstruction, and they carry many lessons in economic organization.
This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice–which features early coverage of Antitrust–punctuates its modern introduction to industrial organization with relevant empirical data and case studies to show readers how to apply theoretical tools.
This book covers the main topics that students need to learn in a course on Industrial Organization. It reviews the classic models and important empirical evidence related to the field. However, it will differ from prior textbooks in two ways. First, this book incorporates contributions from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, providing the reader with a richer understanding of consumer preferences and the motivation for many of the business practices we see today. The book discusses how firms exploit consumers who are prone to making mistakes and who suffer from cognitive dissonance, attention lapses, and bounded rationality, for example and will help explain why firms invest in persuasive advertising, offer 30-day free trials, offer money-back guarantees, and engage in other observed phenomena that cannot be explained by the traditional approaches to industrial organization. A second difference is that this book achieves a balance between textbooks that emphasize formal modeling and those that emphasize the history of the field, empirical evidence, case studies, and policy analysis. This text puts more emphasis on the micro-foundations (i.e., consumer and producer theory), classic game theoretic models, and recent contributions from behavioral economics that are pertinent to industrial organization. Each topic will begin with a discussion of relevant theory and models and will also include a discussion of concrete examples, empirical evidence, and evidence from case studies. This will provide students with a deeper understanding of firm and consumer behavior, of the factors that influence market structure and economic performance, and of policy issues involving imperfectly competitive markets. The book is intended to be a textbook for graduate students, MBAs and upper-level undergraduates and will use examples, graphical analysis, algebra, and simple calculus to explain important ideas and theories in industrial organization.
Industrial Organization: Markets and Strategies provides an up-to-date account of modern industrial organization that blends theory with real-world applications. Written in a clear and accessible style, it acquaints the reader with the most important models for understanding strategies chosen by firms with market power and shows how such firms adapt to different market environments. It covers a wide range of topics including recent developments on product bundling, branding strategies, restrictions in vertical supply relationships, intellectual property protection, and two-sided markets, to name just a few. Models are presented in detail and the main results are summarized as lessons. Formal theory is complemented throughout by real-world cases that show students how it applies to actual organizational settings. The book is accompanied by a website containing a number of additional resources for lecturers and students, including exercises, answers to review questions, case material and slides.
The Theory of Industrial Organization is the first primary text to treat the new industrial organization at the advanced-undergraduate and graduate level. Rigorously analytical and filled with exercises coded to indicate level of difficulty, it provides a unified and modern treatment of the field with accessible models that are simplified to highlight robust economic ideas while working at an intuitive level. To aid students at different levels, each chapter is divided into a main text and supplementary section containing more advanced material. Each chapter opens with elementary models and builds on this base to incorporate current research in a coherent synthesis. Tirole begins with a background discussion of the theory of the firm. In Part I he develops the modern theory of monopoly, addressing single product and multi product pricing, static and intertemporal price discrimination, quality choice, reputation, and vertical restraints. In Part II, Tirole takes up strategic interaction between firms, starting with a novel treatment of the Bertrand-Cournot interdependent pricing problem. He studies how capacity constraints, repeated interaction, product positioning, advertising, and asymmetric information affect competition or tacit collusion. He then develops topics having to do with long term competition, including barriers to entry, contestability, exit, and research and development. He concludes with a "game theory user's manual" and a section of review exercises. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.
This book analyses telecommunications markets from early to mature competition, filling the gap between the existing economic literature on competition and the real-life application of theory to policy. Paul De Bijl and Martin Peitz focus on both the transitory and the persistent asymmetries between telephone companies, investigating the extent to which access price and retail price regulation stimulate both short- and long-term competition. They explore and compare various settings, such as non-linear versus linear pricing, facilities-based versus unbundling-based or carrier-select-based competition, non-segmented versus segmented markets. On the basis of their analysis, De Bijl and Peitz then formulate guidelines for policy. This book is a valuable resource for academics, regulators and telecommunications professionals. It is accompanied by simulation programs devised by the authors both to establish and to illustrate their results.
Understanding Industrial Organizations critically reviews the approaches developed by industrial sociologists to analyze industrial organizations. It outlines four general perspectives on organizations - systems thinking, contingency approach, the action approach and labour process for a more adequate sociology of organizations. The book provides a clear, relevant and important contribution to the sociology of organizations.
This book offers a systematic discussion and explanation on what industrial security is, what the influencing factors of industrial security are, how industrial security should be evaluated and how early warnings should work from the viewpoint of developing countries. Studying theories of industrial security is necessary for the development of industrial economics theory, innovations in industrial economy studies, and an important supplement to and improvement on the theories of industrial economics. Also, studying industrial security theories can offer valuable guidance for the practice of industrial economics and national industrial policy making.
This book contains the key-note lectures and a selection of papers that were presented at the 15th Conference of the European Association for Research in Industrial Econo mics (EARlE) held under the auspices of GRASP at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1988, plus an introductory chapter by the Editors. Upon suggestions by the Editors, all papers have been revised for this book, some more extensively than others. Robin Marris has added to his lecture a synopsis of the contributions to the Round Table on the Micro-Macro Interface which he chaired during the Conference. The papers cover issues that seem to be both interesting and relevant for the 1990s. While some of the papers are cast in a rather established research frame -enabling the use of regular academic routines - others are first attempts at delineating the contours of areas that are peripheral to what is often considered as the core of Industrial Organization. In their introductory chapter, the Editors set forth that a neglect of those areas may well relegate Industrial Organization to social irrelevancy. Therefore, it is hoped that the book will also contribute to a reflection on the main lines of Industrial Organization research for the 1990s -thus helping to create a healthy perspective for this part of economics at a time when macroeconomics is undergoing a severe crisis.
Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization brings together leading scholars who present state-of-the-art research in the spirit of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm embodied in the work of Leonard W. Weiss. The individual chapters are generally empirically or public policy oriented. A number of them introduce new sources of data that, combined with the application of appropriate econometric techniques, enable new breakthroughs and insights on issues hotly debated in the industrial organization literature. For example, five of the chapters are devoted towards uncovering the link between market concentration and pricing behavior. While theoretical models have produced ambiguous predictions concerning the relationship between concentration and price these chapters, which span a number of different markets and situations, provide unequivocal evidence that a high level of market concentration tends to result in a higher level of prices. Three of the chapters explore the impact of market structure on production efficiency, and three other chapters focus on the role of industrial organization on public policy. Contributors include David B. Audretsch, Richard E. Caves, Mark J. Roberts, F.M. Scherer, John J. Siegfried and Hideki Yamawaki.