ABSTRACT
Industrial organization is an applied field of microeconomics; its main task is to conduct empirical testing of the resource allocating function of the price mechanism and to clarify its policy implications. It covers not only organization of individual industries but also issues of public policy, so that it is difficult to draw a well-defined boundary between it and other fields of economics. We limit this survey, however, to the fields listed in the Journal of Economic Literature as “industrial organization and market structure” and “public policy toward monopoly and competition.” Earlier surveys of industrial organization by Hiroshi Niida and Ken’ichi Imai [1], Kojiro Niino [2], and Masao Baba [3], [4] also place emphasis on these fields, though they differ somewhat in coverage.
