Research in economics and industrial organization

摘要

This Special Issue of Research in Economics is dedicated to the field of Industrial Organization (IO) with a variety of articles by some of the best experts in the field. In this introduction we present these essays and the related literature, with a particular emphasis on the positive research (the analysis of market structures) and on the normative research (industrial policy). Traditionally associated with the first formal models of competition by Augustine Cournot in 1838, Francois Bertrand in 1883, Harold Hotelling in 1929 and Heinrich von Stackelberg in 1934, the field of IO includes now a large body of theoretical and empirical literature on the organization and scope of firms, on market structures ranging from monopolies and cartels to oligopolies with an endogenous number of firms, and on the investments in innovation and marketing that affect the same market structures. The articles of this issue will follow this traditional sequence of topics, providing (we hope) a useful reading list for an IO course, which could be complementary to the best recent textbooks in the field, such as Cabral (2000a), Pepall and Richards (2005) and Carlton and Perloff (2015) at the undergraduate level and Martin (1993a), Shy (1995) and Bellefiamme and Peitz (2015) at a more advanced level.