Market structure and performance

What determines structure and profitability across markets for goods and services? Understanding the relationship between market structure and performance is critical for determining effective economic policy governing anti-trust, intellectual property, industry regulation, and international trade. Economists have analyzed these issues for many decades. An initial descriptive literature has given way to a more formalized game-theoretic approach. One stream of literature paints on a large canvas, identifying strong mechanisms that can hold across the broad run of industries. The other focuses on specific industries, building detailed models tailored to key institutional details. Both have yielded important insights and raised additional questions and directions for future research. Recent work promises to unite both streams under a common methodological framework