Ben's bundle of joy Book

This textbook is comprehensive and well-written, over viewing a lot of ground about how firms and markets organize and evolve.
A big highlight for me were the "green boxes" -- the sidebar examples, many of which were interesting and surprising (did you know that cement industry is organized differently in US, Mexico, and Brazil? Did you know Samsung evolved from a very top-down organization focused on volume to much more innovative, risk-taking producer of quality goods?)


Being a textbook, the book provides questions at the end of each chapter, which were helpful in deepening one's understanding and suggesting connections between topics in the text.


Without getting overly theoretical, the book does provide simple economic models -- which are useful in shedding light on topics such as pricing and profit levels in oligopolies. Perhaps the most valuable parts to me were the treatment of oligopoly and discussion of market structure -- including the role of endogenous costs in giving rise to soft-drink-like markets with few dominant forms and many small entrants.


As the title would suggest, the book offers an economics perspective on structure of markets, role of differentiation in strategy, and even internal structure of the firm. Also useful was the treatment of micro and macro dynamics of competition -- both are important to understand if one wants to pick firms which are likely to, for example, attain and retain market dominance, or coexist profitably with other market powers.


Weighing in at around 500 pages of dense network of theories and data, this book took considerable effort to work through, but it amply rewards the effort invested.