ABSTRACT
RESTRICTED competition is the rule in our economy; and the discussion of its efficiency should therefore be the most detailed and the most systematic. Unfortunately, however, little more than a sketch can be offered in the present chapter. There are two reasons for this. One is that restricted competition can take a great variety of forms; the other is that now at last we must aim at realism and discuss not a uniformly restricted economy but one in which all forms of competition and all degrees of monopoly and monopolistic restraint occur. Gone are the neat orderliness and uniformity of perfect and even of free competition. For greater realism, we must pay the price of a considerable loss in simplicity and generality. We saw and discussed the many forms that competitive restriction can assume; we must now consider an economy that is an agglomeration of all these forms, with many elements of free competition thrown in for good measure. Hence, our discussion of efficiency under restricted competition will largely take the form of amendments to results reached in Chapter XVI; and, to facilitate comparison with Chapter XVI, it will follow the order in which the different forms of efficiency were discussed there.
