Monopolio y asignación de recursos

Monopoly and Resource Allocation Arnold C. Harberger The American Economic Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Sixty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. (May, 1954), pp. 77-87.
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http://www.jstor.org Sat Feb 2 09:45:33 2008

MONOPOLY AND RESOURCE ALLOCATIONf
By ARNOLD. HARBERGER C University of Clzicago


One of the first things we learn when we begin to study price theory is that the main effects of monopoly are to misallocate resources, to reduce aggregate welfare, and to redistribute income in favor of monopolists. I n the light ofthis fact, it is a little curious that our empirical efforts a t studying monopoly have so largely concentrated on other things. We have studied particular industries and have come up with a formidable list of monopolistic practices: identical pricing, price leadership, market sharing, patent suppression, basing points, and so on. And we have also studied the whole economy, using the concentrationof production in the hands of a small number of firms as the measure of monopoly. On this basis we have obtained the impression that some 20 or 30 or 40 per cent of our economy is effectively monopolized. In this paper I propose to look at the American economy, and in particular at American manufacturing industry, and try to get some quantitative notion of the allocative and welfare effects ofmonopoly. I t should be clear from the outset that this is not the kind of job one can do with great precision. The best we can hope for is to get a feeling for the general orders of magnitude that are involved. I take it as an operating hypothesis that, in the long run, resources can be allocated among our manufacturing industries in such a way as to yield roughly constant returns. That is,long-run average costs are close to constant in the relevant range, for both the firm and the industry. This hypothesis gives us the wedge we need to get something from the data. For as is well known, the malallocative effects of monopoly stem from the difference between marginal cost and price, and marginal costs are at first glance terribly difficult to pin down empirically for a wide range of firmsand industries. But once we are ready to proceed on the basis of constant average costs, we can utilize the fact that under such circumstances marginal and average costs are the same, and we can easily get some idea of average costs. But that does not solve all the problems, for cost and profit to the economist are not the same things as cost and profit to the accountant, and the accountants make...