IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-15484-5_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Perfect Competition, Historically Contemplated

In: Readings in Industrial Economics

Author

Listed:
  • G. J. Stigler

Abstract

No concept in economics — or elsewhere — is ever defined fully, in the sense that its meaning under every conceivable circumstance is clear. Even a word with a wholly arbitrary meaning in economics, like ‘elasticity’, raises questions which the person who defined it (in this case, Marshall) never faced: for example, how does the concept apply to finite changes or to discontinuous or stochastic or multiple-valued functions ? And of course a word like ‘competition’, which is shared with the whole population, is even less likely to be loaded with restrictions or elaborations to forestall unfelt ambiguities.

Suggested Citation

  • G. J. Stigler, 1972. "Perfect Competition, Historically Contemplated," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Charles K. Rowley (ed.), Readings in Industrial Economics, chapter 7, pages 105-130, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15484-5_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15484-5_7
    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.

    Other versions of this item:

    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:978-1-349-15484-5_7. 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.