ABSTRACT
Economists interested in industrial structure spend much of their time thinking about size of enterprise, but usually about bigness and the problems associated with it rather than about smallness as such. Hostility to bigness of firms relative to markets has a long and honourable history in economics, and the analysis on which that hostility is founded – the resource allocation consequences of monopoly – is very clear. It doesn’t follow, of course, that a passion for resource allocation has invariably been the primary motivation of anti-monopoly economists; and one might suspect that monopoly has sometimes served as a stalking horse for a variety of other social concerns with a less precise rationale, including an aversion to great size as such, whether relative to markets or not. Nevertheless, absolute size has become an explicit focus for concern and research among economists only relatively recently.
