ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: D.H. Macgregor on combination and the evolution of the representative firm: a Marshallian perspective on industrial policy
Author: cristiano carlo
Unlike many of his contemporaries, in Industrial Combination (1906) Macgregor puts forth an analysis in which trusts and cartels are a new form of competitive enterprise rather than the breakdown of competition. Macgregor builds his analysis on the idea (which he later attributed to Marshall’s oral teachings) that “in all competition there was an element of monopoly”, and on the hypothesis that “[i]f industrial combination is to be regarded as the representative method of organization under any circumstances, it ought to have some continuity in its evolution from other types of structure, and it ought to be due to the same evolutionary force of selective competition”. Unsatisfied with Marshall’s analysis of “imperfection”, Macgregor reframes the same notion around the new concepts of Bargaining and Resource. The theory aims to provide the conditions under which the new form of enterprise can prevail as the natural evolution, though not necessarily as the most desirable substitute, of the pre-existing representative method. Accordingly, Macgregor urges the public opinion and the State to take a watchful but unbiased position towards the new form of industrial organization.
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