Retail Industry Structure: 1977-1992‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Coverage of imperfectly competitive output markets in principles of economics texts has traditionally treated retail markets as monopolistically competitive, while confining the discussion of structure measures and oligopoly models to manufacturing. Colander (1995) and Parkin (1998) exemplify authors who offer only manufacturing examples to illustrate structure measures. Both provide Hirschman-Herfindahl index measures for selected manufacturing industries; Colander also includes four-firm concentration ratios. Authors of leading texts such as McConnell and Brue (1999), Boyes and Melvin (1999), and Hall and Lieberman (1998) present retail industries that contain large national firms as examples of monopolistically competitive industries. Specifically, McConnell and Brue cite dining out, Boyes and Melvin consider retail clothing stores including The Gap, The Limited and Limited Express, while Hall and Lieberman identify food markets among the industries that fit the structural conditions of monopolistic competition. The implicit assumption of these and most other economics texts is that retailing industries are too atomistic for coordinated pricing to occur and that relevant pricing models for retailing should posit independent behavior.