Recent Developments in the Theory of Industrial Organization.

• Author: Schap, David

Thomas Wolfe is right: You Can't Go Home Again. My research over the last decade has drawn me ever farther away from the field of industrial organization, in which I did field work during graduate studies and some research and publishing early in my career. Preparing this review presented for me an opportunity to return to my roots, albeit knowing full well from the title of the book that much besides my own perspective would be different. I would not make too much of a personal experience except that in my department of a dozen economists there are in fact two others who have similarly moved on from industrial organization origins. Even if fewer than three-twelfths of all economists have had an experience similar to my own, those few will find the volume under review to be an excellent choice for recapturing much of what has been missed during the last decade.

For those that judge a book if not by its cover then by its table of contents, let me provide the following set of abbreviated facts. The book is cohesively organized into an introduction plus four major parts: "Recent Approaches to Industrial Organization," "The Behavior of Individual Firms and the Characteristics of Industrial Systems," "The Theory of the Firm and Industrial Organization," and "Technical Progress and Market Structures." A fairly accurate characterization is that the introduction and the chapters in the first of the four parts primarily seek to describe the present state of development in industrial organization whereas the book's remaining chapters seek to be themselves new developments in industrial organization. Consequently, specialists in industrial organization may be drawn to the second portion of the book (as just characterized) while readers such as myself, yearning to get reacquainted with industrial organization, will find the first portion satisfying.

Although nowhere mentioned in the front matter, my reading of footnotes revealed that the book arose out of papers presented at a conference bearing the same title as the book, convened April, 1989 in Naples, Italy. Conference volumes are notorious for being a reviewer's nightmare in that there is little opportunity for deep analysis of any of the contributions if the entire volume is to be described. As a compromise I intend to complete a full but at times undetailed review of the entire contents, with apportionment of space reflecting my interest as described in the previous paragraph.

The editor's...