A perfect-competition model is developed to analyze duality in specialization and technology such as in the men's clothing industry, an industry with highly seasonal nature of the business cycle. We show that when the market fluctuation is large enough, some firms will specialize in one good with the advantage of static efficiency, while other firms will generalize in multi-variety production as a means of self- insurance. The specialized firms mainly satisfy the stable component of market demand, while the generalized firms satisfy only the variable components of demands. Relative to the specialized firms, the generalized firms have a smaller firm size and a lower degree of vertical division of labor within the firm, and use the technology with more flexible specialization but less capital-labor ratio.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Monash University, Department of Economics in its series Monash Economics Working Papers with number
37/07.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: