1.2.2 The History of Competition Policies 4 These are the reasons why the historiography that focused on profit maximisation models in imperfectly competitive markets has little to say about the causes of monopoly power in economic thought. 3 These formal models do not consider entry of new firms, and do not pay much attention to the causes of market power, often taking them as given. The history of these attempts has been reconstructed by many scholars, 2 who all agree on the fact that it began with the work of Cournot (1838), followed by Dupuit (1844), Bertrand (1883), Launhardt (1885), Auspitz and Lieben (1889), Edgeworth (1897), Bowley (1924), Hotelling (1929), Chamberlin (1933) and J. The first field of enquiry concerns the attempts to calculate equilibrium prices and quantities in imperfectly competitive markets. Nevertheless, as we shall see, also the historiography of the theory of competition will provide various ideas for a history of the sources of market power. This is true insofar as market power is the characteristic feature of all imperfectly competitive markets, so the natural place to look to follow its historical development is in these fields. The four possible fields of enquiry in which to seek the origins of the notion of monopoly power are to be found within the pre-history and history of industrial economics and competition policies.

Moreover, it has been written in the conviction that in the study of economic thought one cannot restrict oneself to simply narrating a history, one must also have some very good reasons for doing so. This chapter is of a historiographical character and places this book within the existing panorama of the secondary literature. The first concerns the history of the formal models of profit maximisation in imperfectly competitive markets the second, competition policies in a historical perspective the third, the theory of competition in economic thought and the fourth, the development of the notion of entry barriers. When was the notion of market power defined? And how has it been explained in the history of economic thought? In this chapter, we distinguish four different fields of enquiry in which to seek a history of ideas on the causes of market power.

Technical monopoly examples