IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-06062-7_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Geographical Competition

In: Geographical Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Patrick O’Sullivan

Abstract

In our discussion in the last chapter of producers’ behaviour in geographical space, assumptions of many producers and free entry by new producers were employed to warrant perfectly competitive resolution of market prices and quantities. On the other hand, to investigate industrial plant location, the other extreme of a natural monopolist, bound by government regulation as to price and quantity output, was invoked. This reduced the problem to a cost-minimizing one. What we often see about us lies between these extremes. Frequently, it is a matter of a few large producers jostling for a national market, constrained to some degree by government control, real or potential. This is the case with the manufacture of cars, beer, processed foods, inter-city travel, television and newspapers. The behaviour of such oligopolists becomes a ceaseless game with no predictable outcome. It is impossible to determine a market equilibrium in such competitive circumstances and thus to judge whether it is socially desirable. There is a contention that, in general, oligopolistic competition leads to excessive similarity of products, which is not in accord with the best interests of all of society. In geographical terms, this centripetal force takes the form of locating production in the same place. More generally, it involves closing the spectrum of product type and quality on offer. The debate on this issue has usually been couched in terms of the geography of production. This is so because the physical distance and transport cost separation between producers is a simple dimension along which to measure their dissimilarity.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick O’Sullivan, 1981. "Geographical Competition," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Geographical Economics, chapter 3, pages 49-58, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-06062-7_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-06062-7_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-06062-7_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.