The Economics of Imperfect Competition

When Joan Robinson came to write The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson, 1933a), she also began her long intellectual friendship with Richard Kahn. At much the same time, Kahn was writing his extraordinary fellowship dissertation for King’s, The Economics of the Short Period (Kahn, 1929; 1989), after only one year of studying economics (see Harcourt, 1991; 1993). She almost certainly attended some of Piero Sraffa’s remarkable lectures on ‘Advanced theory of Value’ (see Marcuzzo, 2005), which were given at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. As an undergraduate in the early 1920s she became familiar with the contents of A. C. Pigou’s, Dennis Robertson’s and, especially, Gerald Shove’s, lectures and writings (in Shove’s case, writings were rare) on Marshallian and Pigovian value theory. Joan’s supervisor at Girton, Marjorie Tappan-Hollond, with whom she did not get on (but see Ch. 1, p. 3, n6), was also a staunch Marshallian. Austin Robinson was working on his The Structure of Competitive Industry (1931), ostensibly a textbook for the Cambridge Economic Handbook series, but in reality an original and innovative monograph on the theory of the firm (as John Whitaker (1989) points out; see also Harcourt (1997a; 2001a)), probably even before she started her book, certainly simultaneously with it. (As we saw, Joan and Austin had married in 1926 and went to India for two years, returning to Cambridge in the late 1920s.)