ABSTRACT
Marshall focused chiefly on the determination of commodity and factor prices in markets characterized by freedom of industry and enterprise because large numbers of buyers and sellers of homogeneous commodities and services were trading in them. He had a well-developed model of monopoly, though he accorded the problem of pricing in this type of market much less attention than he lavished on the behavior of competitive markets. Further, he hardly perceived the possibility that some markets might have characteristics that enabled sellers to exert individual control over their prices even though they were not monopolists. Yet, it is precisely this grey area of pricing in markets that are neither purely competitive nor purely monopolistic that became a major area of investigation during the 1930s.
