IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-22906-2_17.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Spatial Price Theory and Market Delineation

In: Does Economic Space Matter?

Author

Listed:
  • Bruce L. Benson
  • Milton H. Marquis
  • Douglas G. Sauer

Abstract

M. L. Greenhut has long maintained that ‘One policy area which not only lends itself to [spatial price] theory, but actually requires consideration of spatial relationships is that of antitrust’ (Greenhut and Benson, 1989, p. 3). Market delineation is a fundamental issue in antitrust practice (Marcus, 1980, p. 294) which cannot be fully appreciated without direct application of spatial price theory (Greenhut and Benson, 1989, p. 3).1 This is a required first step in the application of the US Clayton Act merger section, in Sherman Act monopoly cases, and under Canada’s Competition Act, where market share and market concentration data are offered as evidence of market power. Thus, a large literature has developed on the subject of market delineation (surprisingly little of it draws from spatial price theory, however, the exceptions being Benson, 1980; Greenhut and Benson, 1989; Benson and Faminow, 1990; and Benson et al., 1991)2 Indeed, a distinction between the ‘economic market’ and the ‘antitrust market’ has been drawn (Scheffman and Spiller, 1987). The economic market in which a firm operates encompasses all of the supply and demand forces that influence that firm’s price, while an antitrust market presumably consists of a ‘group of producers and geographic area, that could, if cartelized, profitably exercise market power’ (Scheffman and Spiller, 1987, p. 126).

Suggested Citation

  • Bruce L. Benson & Milton H. Marquis & Douglas G. Sauer, 1993. "Spatial Price Theory and Market Delineation," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Hiroshi Ohta & Jacques-François Thisse (ed.), Does Economic Space Matter?, chapter 16, pages 316-334, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-22906-2_17
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-22906-2_17
    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:978-1-349-22906-2_17. 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.