New Industrial Organization: Market Forces and Strategic Behavior

This timely book surveys and illuminates the recent literature on industrial organization by contrasting the analyses based on the idea of "natural" adaptation of industry to environmental conditions and those that focus on the "strategic" dimension and manipulation of environment. Among the topics dealt with are the sociobiology of economic organizations and such allied issues as evolutionary economics, natural selection, and adaptation; game-theoretic models of strategic behavior; and the social, political, and legal implications of industrial policy. In the introduction, Jacquemin discusses and compares the features of classical industrial organization and those of the "new industrial organization." The first chapter - on market selection processes - sounds the book's keynote. It blends traditional themes such as long-run competitive equilibrium and Darwinian economic selection with recent research on contestable markets and equilibrium in imperfectly competitive industries. It also sharplycontrasts the views of the natural selection theory and the maximization process on the one hand, with those of the new industrial organization and strategic behavior, on the other. Other chapters deal with oligopoly, concentration, and market power; with barriers to entry, both natural and strategic; with open problems in organization theory (a treatment that blends Williamson's transactions-costs concept with analytical modes to explain the divisionalization of the modeJacquemin, Alexis P. is the author of 'New Industrial Organization: Market Forces and Strategic Behavior', published 1987 under ISBN 9780262100359 and ISBN 0262100355.