Since 1970 several new theories and alternative interpretations have challenged the traditional industrial organization view of market competition. These range from the superior efficiency view of the Chicago school to theories of strategic groups and behavior. An important opportunity exists for empirical research to test these alternative views. This research is particularly appropriate for public researchers interested in agribusiness management since it has clear implications for both the public and private sectors.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the US experienced substantial changes in both the structure of industries and in the prevailing views of the influence of industry structure. I will spend little time in this article tracking the changes in industry structure. This is readily available elsewhere. 1-3 I will focus instead on the more fundamental issue: the relationships between the structure of markets and the competitive behavior and performance of firms in those markets. This is the realm of industrial organization economics, an applied branch of micro-economic theory.
Until recent years, the field of industrial organization has attracted relatively little attention from those interested in business management. During the year I spent at the Harvard Business School in 1969-1970, the structure-conductperformance paradigm of industrial organization was largely either ignored or viewed as a gross simplification of reality that had few potential applications.