ABSTRACT
The General Editor of this series, Mr C. F. Carter, has read my manuscript with that salutary critical exactness and penetration which, through more than twenty years, he has been willing, out of an extreme generosity, to give to a great deal of work of mine. If, in a number of cases, I have left my text as I originally wrote it, my excuse must be a difficulty which I have felt in departing from a scheme initially conceived as a unity, the expression of which I feel a need to leave intact to take its chance amongst such critical storms as it may meet. More than one person, baldly informed that the task of writing a book ‘on the theory of the firm’ had been entrusted to me, has been unable to conceal a hint of alarm. But the work on which the substance of this book is based is either the now wholly orthodox and long-established work of the value theorists of the last hundred years (Chapter 3) or of Professor Leontief (Chapter 2), or where it is my own (Chapter 5 and some themes of Chapter 4), it has been appearing in print, from time to time, through the last thirty years; so that its appearance in the present text must have been expeeted by those responsible for inviting this contribution to their series. I feel, therefore, that my conscience is clear. Chapter 6 deals with a region of theory which has been controversial since Cournot or Edgeworth. This chapter, again, incorporates some work of my own (Expectation in Economics, 1949, Chapter VI, on ‘A Theory of the Bargaining Process’), but in highly essential respects it draws also on the admirable treatment by Dr Alan Coddington in his Theories of the Bargaining Process. 1
