A Brief History of Imperfect Competition

I explore the history of the idea of imperfect competition in economics. Its foundations were in the Nineteenth Century, but largely outside the Anglo-sphere. It was only in the 1930s that the idea took off in the U.S. and Britain with Chamberlin and Robinson developing a coherent and well worked out alternative in the form of monopolistic competition, which made it into Samuelson’s iconic textbook Economics in 1948. In the second half of the twentieth century, the idea gradually caught on in