ABSTRACT
The term ‘market structure’ refers to a limited number of organisational characteristics which establish certain interrelationships between buyers and sellers. The concept of market structure is central to another branch of economics which is usually referred to as industrial organisation analysis. The emphasis of the latter is essentially external to the firm; that is, it concentrates on an empirical investigation of the environment within which firms operate. In practice the majority of empirical work has been centred on the measurement of the degree of seller concentration, and it is therefore inevitable that the dimension of market structure should dominate the following subsections. This fact demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the model, namely that the concept of structure is multidimensional whereas practical measurement is limited to a very small number of variables. Market structure is multidimensional whereas, because of measurement problems, in pràctice only one aspect of structure has been studied comprehensively.
