Profile Major Works Resources

Edward H. Chamberlin, 1899-1967.

Portrait of E.H. Chamberlin


The American economist Edward H. Chamberlin was educated at Iowa and Michigan, before proceeding on to Harvard, where studied under Allyn A. Young.  His remarkable dissertation, submitted in 1927, introduced the theory of "monopolistic competition", later unveiled to the world in his 1933 book.  Chamberlin was immediately appointed to the Harvard faculty, where he would remain for the remainder of his life.  

Chamberlin's theory did not unleash a wholesale revolution in microeconomics, as he had hoped, but it effectively launched the field of industrial organization, which had hitherto been hampered by its limitation to two extreme cases, and gave it new concepts and tools of analysis (e.g. product differentiation).  Chamberlin would expend much effort differentiating the theory of monopolistic competition from Joan Robinson's theory of imperfect competition, and defending his theory from attacks by the Chicago School and other critics.

 

  

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Major works of Edward H. Chamberlin

  • "Duopoly: Values where sellers are few", 1929, QJE
  • Theory of Monopolistic Competition, 1933.
  • "Advertising Costs and Equilibrium", 1944, RES.
  • "Proportionality, Divisibility and Economics of Scale", 1948, QJE.
  • "An Experimental Imperfect Market", 1948, JPE.
  • "Product Heterogeneity and Public Policy", 1950, AER.
  • "Monopolistic Competition Revisited", 1951.
  • "Impact of Recent Monopoly Theory on the Schumpeterian System", 1951, REStat.
  • "Full Cost and Monopolistic Competition", 1952, EJ.
  • "The Product as an Economic Variable", 1953, QJE.
  • "Some Aspects of Nonprice Competition", 1954, in Huegy, editor, Role and Nature of Competition.
  • "Measuring the Degree of Monopoly and Competition", 1954, in Chamberlin, editor, Monopoly and Competition and their Regulation.
  • "The Monopoly Power of Labor", 1957, in Wright, editor, Impact of the Union.
  • "On the Origin of Oligopoly", 1957, EJ.
  • Towards a More General Theory of Value, 1957.
HET

 
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Resources on E.H. Chamberlin

 

 
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