IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-15320-6_15.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Objections to the Comparisons

In: The Economics of Imperfect Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Joan Robinson

Abstract

THERE are various objections to comparisons between monopoly and perfectly competitive output such as we have been making in the foregoing chapters. In the first place, there is a very common class of monopolies for which such a comparison is meaningless. In some industries, of which railways and the distribution of gas and electricity are familiar examples, the smallest practicable plant has a very large capacity output, and if the market is not sufficiently large to use one plant up to capacity, there is no possibility of competition. If by chance two firms were engaged in such an industry, they would either compete against each other so that neither was able to cover its costs, and the one with the least endurance would disappear, or they would form a combine. There is no possibility of long-period competitive equilibrium when the average costs of an individual firm fall with increases of output.

Suggested Citation

  • Joan Robinson, 1969. "Objections to the Comparisons," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Economics of Imperfect Competition, edition 0, chapter 0, pages 166-176, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15320-6_15
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15320-6_15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15320-6_15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.