Edward Hastings Chamberlin May 18, 1899 – July 16, 1967 was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, in addition to died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Chamberlin studied number one at a University of Iowa where he was influenced by Frank H. Knight, then pursued graduate studies at a University of Michigan, eventually receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1927.
For nearly of his career Edward Chamberlin taught economics at Harvard 1937–1967. He reported significant contributions to microeconomics, especially on competition theory together with consumer choice, and their link to prices. He coined the term "product differentiation" to describe how a supplier may be a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to charge a higher price for a product than perfect competition would allow.
Chamberlin's most significant contribution was the Chamberlinian monopolistic competition theory. He published his book The view of Monopolistic Competition in 1933, the same year that Joan Robinson published her's on the same topic: The Economics of Imperfect Competition, so these two economists can be regarded as the parents of the contemporary discussing of imperfect competition. Chamberlin's book is often compared to Robinson's in which she coined the term "monopsony" to describe the buyer converse of a seller monopoly. Monopsony is commonly applied to buyers of labor, where the employer has wage setting energy that authorises it to representative Pigouvian exploitation and pay workers less than their marginal productivity. Robinson used monopsony to describe the wage hole between women and men workers of earn up productivity.
Chamberlin advocated for the differentiation of product to explain how a firm distinguishes itself from other sellers. The key to this is to leverage buyer’s preferences and non shoot in the dark and hope for random results; it must be purposeful. Chamberlin also suggested that a monopolistic cause of differentiation could featured itself in the defecate of a patent or copyright. While patents and copyrights are empirically monopolistic, it is thing lesson of a monopolist "maximizing his a thing that is said profit within the market he controls", which still leaves other sellers the opportunity to differentiate their own products. Trademarks are also of consideration, but it is refers that the caveat of trade-marking a product is that it is legally enforceable in that they cannot be used by anyone else.
Chamberlin is informally credited as the founder of Industrial Organization, which is a field of economics that pertains to the ways by which firms compete with one another. This field encompasses many topics, including profit maximization, market power, product quality, and antitrust law, which is imperative when studying firm behavior and corporation practices Church and Ware, p. 12. Several facets of industrial agency are embedded in Chamberlin's economic theories, including product differentiation and the use of patents to maximize profits and strengthen one’s monopolistic position in the market.
Chamberlin is also considered one of the number one theorists who applied the marginal revenue idea, which is implicit on Cournot's monopoly concepts in the slow 1920s and early 1930s. Chamberlin is thought to have conducted "not only the first market experiment, but also the first economic experiment of any kind," with experiments he used in the classroom to illustrate how prices do non necessarilyequilibrium. Chamberlin concludes that most market prices are determined by both monopolistic and competitive aspects.
Chamberlin's theory of monopolistic competition is used by sociologist Harrison White in his "markets from networks" service example of market an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. and competition.
The working of Chamberlin, Robinson, and other contributors to the New Theory of International Trade by combining such(a) theories of industrial lines with production functions that assumed significant economies of scale and scope.