Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Empirical Applications, 5th Edition

Preface to the Fifth Edition

We are greatly pleased by the publication of the fifth edition of Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Practice. It is gratifying to have such continued market confirmation of our conceptualization of the field and its major contributions—in particular, that the application of rigorous thinking about strategic interaction yields important and testable insights into real world events. We believe that this edition of our textbook renews this message.

Overall, the organization of the book is roughly the same as the previous edition but there are important changes. The two chapters on price-fixing and anti-trust policy vis-à-vis collusion (Chapters 14 and 15 in the fourth edition) have been streamlined and combined into one chapter. The same is true for the formerly two separate chapters on advertising (Chapters 20 and 21 in the fourth edition). More importantly, we have added a new chapter on strategic interaction as it applies to international competition and the scope this introduces for strategic trade policies. The net change is one less chapter and a more concise text.

The two most substantive changes, however, are: 1) the inclusion of a somewhat extended discussion of a single empirical study in each chapter; and 2) the shift of all calculus derivations to chapter appendices. The first of these builds on the innovation in the fourth edition in which we included an empirical study in roughly every other chapter. Finding studies that are ...