Since the pioneering study of Harberger, monopoly welfare loss has received much attention in the literature. However, no attempt has been made explicitly to incorporate oligopolistic interaction. In this paper we postulate a specific social welfare function and solve directly for the level of...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine recent work in monopolistic competition theory concerned with the influence of fixed costs (no convexities) on Chamberlin’s (1951) welfare ‘ideal’ which distinguishes a trade-off between allocative efficiency and product diversity. Inefficiency...