Industrial organization
Industrial organization studies how firms, markets, and public policies shape competition, pricing, production, and business strategy.
Market structure: The organization of a market by the number and size of firms, product differences, and barriers to entry. It frames how concentration and product differences constrain firms’ competitive choices.
Antitrust: Laws and enforcement actions intended to protect competition and restrain anticompetitive conduct. Industrial organization informs how authorities assess conduct and market structure.
Demand curve: A relation showing the quantity of a good consumers will buy at different prices, holding other factors constant. It determines how a firm’s sales respond when it changes price.
Perfect competition: A market model with many small firms, homogeneous products, free entry, and price-taking behavior. It provides a benchmark against which strategic behavior and market power are measured.
Edward Chamberlin: An American economist whose theory of monopolistic competition analyzed markets with differentiated products. His framework made product differentiation central to explaining imperfect competition.
Bertrand competition: A model in which firms selling substitute products choose prices simultaneously. It shows how price competition can drive prices toward marginal cost.
Merger control: Public review of proposed mergers to determine whether they may substantially lessen competition. Merger analysis draws on models of prices, entry, and competitive effects.
Marginal cost: The additional cost of producing one more unit of a good or service. It is a key benchmark for pricing, output, and competitive efficiency.
Monopoly: A market structure in which one seller faces no close competitor for a product. It is the limiting case for analyzing pricing power and output restriction.
Joan Robinson: A British economist whose work developed the analysis of imperfect competition and monopsony. Her analysis clarified how firms and buyers can exercise market power.