This is an entry produced for the Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis, edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz D. Kurz. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, forthcoming.

I start from Nicola Giocoli’s acute rational reconstruction of current US antitrust debate which shows that there really is no shortage of plausible explanations to the Chicago persistent appeal puzzle. Each explanation, taken in isolation, is, at best, only partial. In my view, the persistent...

We compare and analyse two different conceptions of market competition: the walrasian notion of perfect competition and the Classical notion of free competition: while the former may be described as an equilibrium state in which atomistic agents treat prices parametrically, the latter is a...

The paper seeks to fill a lacuna within Classical economics concerning the process of market price determination in a short-period equilibrium. To this aim, first we distinguish the Classical notion of free competition from the Walrasian notion of perfect competition and we argue that the latter...

The paper proposes a rational reconstruction of the arguments developed by Malthus and Ricardo in their 1815 essays, Grounds of an Opinion and An Essay on Profits, to repudiate and endorse a policy of free corn trade, respectively. Malthus envisaged defence and opulence as two mutually...

This is an entry produced for the Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis, edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz D. Kurz (eds). Volume 3. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, forthcoming. We analyze competition as rivarly in a race, as a specific market structure, and as...

The structure of the Chapter is as follows. In Section 2 I discuss some of the factors that may have played a role in causing the crisis and emphasise that supporters of different economic theories will assign different weights to each factor in their analyses. As a consequence, suggested...

The paper analyzes Adam Smith’s views on monopoly focusing on Book IV and V of The Wealth of Nations and argues that Smith has left his analysis of monopoly in an embryonic form while the majority of scholars have assessed it starting from premises different from those, actually though...