Abstract
An oligopoly is an industry with only a few firms. ‘Few’ means a number small enough for the pricing and marketing policies of one firm to have a significant effect on the sales of other firms. Some theories of oligopoly assume that all firms produce a homogeneous product, which may be true in a number of cases, such as the market for petrol, but there are also many oligopolies where the product is differentiated, for instance, the car industry.
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Notes
A. Cournot, Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth, translated by N. T. Bacon (New York: Macmillan, 1929). (Originally published in French in 1838.)
F. Y. Edgeworth, ‘The Pure Theory of Monopoly’, in F. Y. Edgeworth, Papers Relating to Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1925) pp. 111–42. (Originally published in Italian in 1897.)
K. Cowling, Monopoly Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1982).
P. Sweezy, ‘Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 47 (1939), pp. 568–73.
C. W. Efroymson, ‘The Kinked Oligopoly Curve Reconsidered’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 69 (1954), pp. 119–36.
G. J. Stigler, ‘The Kinky Oligopoly Demand Curve and Rigid Prices’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 55 (1947), pp. 432–49.
J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1953).
See Chapter 18 of W. J. Baumol, Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, 4th edn (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977).
M. Spence, ‘Entry, investment and oligopolistic pricing’, Bell Journal of Economics, vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1977), pp. 534–44.
See pp. 141–53 of R. W. Shaw and C. J. Sutton, Industry and Competition: Industrial Case Studies (London: Macmillan, 1976).
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© 1988 M.J. Rosser
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Rosser, M. (1988). Oligopoly. In: Microeconomics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19553-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19553-4_7
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