This work approaches traditional price theory and the analysis of imperfect competition, to represent a breakthrough in the development of microeconomic theory. Increasingly, it has been recognized that the perfectly competitive paradigm is inappropriate to the explanation of pricing behaviour in many real life markets characterized by a significant separation between producers and consumers. The spatial perspective adopted by the authors provides a natural separation of markets, but provides as well a powerful analogy for apparently nonspatial issues such as product differentiation, pricing over time, problems of storage and transportation, and the economics of intra-industry trade and of the multinational enterprise. A major concern of this volume is to make these analogies explicit by applying this spatial analysis to a wide variety of nonspatial problems. In addition, the analysis and results presented in this book are shown to carry signficant policy implications with respect, for example, to the Robinson-Patman legislation, anti-merger policies, and anti-dumping legislation.

This work approaches traditional price theory and the analysis of imperfect competition, to represent a breakthrough in the development of microeconomic theory. Increasingly, it has been recognized that the perfectly competitive paradigm is inappropriate to the explanation of pricing behaviour in many real life markets characterized by a significant separation between producers and consumers. The spatial perspective adopted by the authors provides a natural separation of markets, but provides as well a powerful analogy for apparently nonspatial issues such as product differentiation, pricing over time, problems of storage and transportation, and the economics of intra-industry trade and of the multinational enterprise. A major concern of this volume is to make these analogies explicit by applying this spatial analysis to a wide variety of nonspatial problems. In addition, the analysis and results presented in this book are shown to carry signficant policy implications with respect, for example, to the Robinson-Patman legislation, anti-merger policies, and anti-dumping legislation.