The traditional approach to antitrust, associated with the Harvard school, regards monopoly as a mechanism that reduces consumers' surplus, while the view held by the Chicago school suggests that a large firm market share reflects superior competitive performance and, if it is not the result of collusion, its effect on allocative efficiency is a rather non - malignant one. We attempt to evaluate the two antitrust approaches within the context of Greek manufacturing industries, and the novelties in the present thesis lie in bringing into the examination of the Harvard - Chicago debate a number of issues that have been treated as separate attempts to unveil the competitive process in the U.S. and the U.K., but never included together within a single comprehensive study. This is achieved by analyzing the profits - concentration relationship over a number of years, the influence of firm and industry characteristics on the determination of profit rates, growth and survival patterns of firms taking into consideration sample selection bias problems, the persistence of manufacturing profitability oyer time, the structural firm and industry determinants of leading firms' profitability and the importance of multinational corporations. Our main empirical findings reveal that large firms and more concentrated markets in Greece are no more profitable than smaller firms and less concentrated markets respectively, and although they refute the extreme forms of the market power and efficiency hypotheses, market power did hold sway in a number of circumstances and its role plays a greater part in the behaviour of manufacturing industries and firms in Greece. Greek antitrust authorities should be concerned with firms' strategic behaviour related to the restriction of competition in more concentrated markets, ane on the above grounds, we do not recommend a deconcentration policy per se, bu' intervention when the competitive functioning of markets is unfairly hindered
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:306117 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Bourlakis, Constantine A. |
| Publisher | University of East Anglia |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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