Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Economist -- "He helped move economics beyond the narrow ideal of perfect competition by introducing the idea of contestable markets, in which competitive pressure comes from the worry that rivals will swoop in to vie for a market if incumbents are anything other than ruthlessly efficient. Perfectly contestable markets should be just as efficient as perfectly competitive ones, even if only a handful of firms dominate a business. His framework gave economists a way to model what they previously could not: why some industries have lots of firms and others have just a few. Firms should enter the market until all are operating at the most efficient scale (so they cannot cut costs by selling more or fewer units). He was not preaching the Panglossian infallibility of markets. Rather, he helped economists understand why some industries might be more concentrated than others—and when oligopoly is a consequence of corporate chicanery rather than market efficiencies."

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