Economia industriale. Concorrenza, strategie e politiche pubbliche. 2° edizione

[Autom. eng. transl.] Over the last few decades, the segment of economic studies, known in our country with the name of Industrial Economics, and in the Anglo-Saxon world with that of Industrial Organization, has profoundly changed. The traditional approach, developed between the thirties and sixties of the last century by the great scholars of the Harvard school, and summarized in the structure-behavior-economic paradigm, has been enriched by multiple microeconomic contributions, which have greatly expanded both the a range of subjects to be studied in this area, both the theoretical and empirical instrumentation that can be used to address them. The developments, which have proved to be essential for the evolution of the Industrial Economy, concern mainly transaction costs and imperfect contracts, the contestability of markets and the characteristics of information, while game theory has had a significant impact in the study of the oligopolistic markets, the main object of analysis of this discipline. The effects were significant: the old textbooks have quickly become obsolete and numerous manuals have been published that seek to provide more up-to-date knowledge and tools. Many of them, however, present serious limitations, because the search for the new has led many authors to set aside some of the most relevant acquisitions of the traditional approach. The book by Lipczynski, Wilson and Goddard, a text uses traditional and new approaches in a balanced way. On the one hand, in fact, it presents in an updated way the issues that are fundamental to understanding the elements of the market structure, such as economies of scale, barriers to entry and market concentration, which shape the appearance and strongly condition the production processes. On the other hand, however, it also presents the most recent developments, such as product positioning (differentiation, advertising, research and development), strategic behavior towards rivals (predatory policies, vertical restrictions, mergers and acquisitions) and the different types of price discrimination, thus consolidating the vision that gives corporate behavior a central role in determining the market structure and economic results. Finally, the volume does not overlook industrial policies, which have been almost completely absent in manuals of American origin, which are limited to considering exclusively the policies of protection of competition and market regulation. English has suffered some cuts, it is addressed to university students who have a knowledge of microeconomics theory, but also to those who, even if they do not possess this knowledge, can acquire the basic concepts in the initial chapters of the volume which, in a synthetic way, take up the cornerstones of the microeconomic theory from which the industrial economy developed.