Here are 100 books that Competition Demystified fans have personally recommended if you like
Competition Demystified.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
After college, I studied economics and law. Working in antitrust lets me use what I’ve learned about both fields. I’ve been a professor at a law school and a business school and worked on competition issues while serving in senior government positions in multiple federal agencies, including both antitrust agencies. I also like working in antitrust because fostering competition is important to our economy. Competition encourages firms to pursue success by developing and selling better and cheaper products and services, not by coordinating with their rivals or trying to exclude them. And I like antitrust because the cases can involve any industry—I might learn about baby food one day and digital platforms the next.
This detailed historical narrative ably recounts the zig-zags in government policy toward large firms during the New Deal and the concomitant debates among advocates of regulation, antitrust, and laissez-faire.
Modern antitrust can be understood as emerging during the 1940s to resolve the 1930s policy struggles successfully. Today’s antitrust policy debate may seem new and fresh, but it often echoes the divergent positions taken during the 1930s.
A re-issue of this classic study of President Roosevelt's adminstrative policy toward monopoly during the period of the New Deal, updated with a new introduction by the author.
After college, I studied economics and law. Working in antitrust lets me use what I’ve learned about both fields. I’ve been a professor at a law school and a business school and worked on competition issues while serving in senior government positions in multiple federal agencies, including both antitrust agencies. I also like working in antitrust because fostering competition is important to our economy. Competition encourages firms to pursue success by developing and selling better and cheaper products and services, not by coordinating with their rivals or trying to exclude them. And I like antitrust because the cases can involve any industry—I might learn about baby food one day and digital platforms the next.
This is the tenth in a charming series of children’s books about Freddy the Pig and the other talking animals on the Bean farm that began in the early 20th century, two decades before Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Freddy has been called a renaissance pig—a detective, poet, pilot, newspaper editor, and much more.
In this story, the rapacious owner of the local newspaper employs various underhanded tactics to shut down the rival paper edited by Freddy. The scheme is thwarted when Freddy’s lawyer, Old Whibley the owl, convinces a judge that the would-be monopolist engaged in “kidnapping, theft, and conspiracy in restraint of trade.”
As is evident, by the 1940s, when the book was published, antitrust was recognized in popular culture as the legal tool for protecting the victims of unfair competitive tactics—which is still how we see it today.
After college, I studied economics and law. Working in antitrust lets me use what I’ve learned about both fields. I’ve been a professor at a law school and a business school and worked on competition issues while serving in senior government positions in multiple federal agencies, including both antitrust agencies. I also like working in antitrust because fostering competition is important to our economy. Competition encourages firms to pursue success by developing and selling better and cheaper products and services, not by coordinating with their rivals or trying to exclude them. And I like antitrust because the cases can involve any industry—I might learn about baby food one day and digital platforms the next.
This is a wide-ranging, thought-provoking, accessible, informed, lively, and convincing economic history of the “long” 20th century (1870 to 2010).
Among its many narratives, the book shows how “thirty glorious years of social democracy” ended around 1975 when the U.S. and other economies in the global north took “the neoliberal turn” in favor of relying more on the market to organize society.
That history is essential context for understanding why the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, relaxed the “structural era” antitrust rules in place since the 1940s, which had emphasized skepticism about growing concentration and the conduct of large firms in concentrated markets.
The book also emphasizes the importance of technology-driven economic growth for human well-being. That perspective helps make the case today for economic policies that promote competition among firms, which fosters productivity and growth.
From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied. Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would use such powers to build utopia, but it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming, economic depression, uncertainty, inequality, and broad rejection of the status…
After college, I studied economics and law. Working in antitrust lets me use what I’ve learned about both fields. I’ve been a professor at a law school and a business school and worked on competition issues while serving in senior government positions in multiple federal agencies, including both antitrust agencies. I also like working in antitrust because fostering competition is important to our economy. Competition encourages firms to pursue success by developing and selling better and cheaper products and services, not by coordinating with their rivals or trying to exclude them. And I like antitrust because the cases can involve any industry—I might learn about baby food one day and digital platforms the next.
Information technology is reshaping the economy and has raised novel competition concerns.
Many of the highest-profile antitrust cases involve giant firms in the information technology sector, from IBM and Microsoft in the past to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta today.
This business strategy book, written by two leading economists, taught a generation of business leaders how to navigate the competitive challenges that arise in information industries. It explains simply and clearly, with useful examples, concepts like network effects and lock-in that form the essential economic background for understanding both the business strategy problems that are the focus of the book and the antitrust issues that can arise in this sector.
In Information Rules, authors Shapiro and Varian reveal that many classic economic concepts can provide the insight and understanding necessary to succeed in the information age. They argue that if managers seriously want to develop effective strategies for competing in the new economy, they must understand the fundamental economics of information technology. Whether information takes the form of software code or recorded music, is published in a book or magazine, or even posted on a website, managers must know how to evaluate the consequences of pricing, protecting, and planning new versions of information products, services, and systems. The first book…
The heart of Golden Rule is its presentation of the investment theory of party competition. This developed out of a crucial formative experience of mine as a graduate student at Princeton University in the mid-seventies. An adviser remarked to me that Ivy Lee’s papers were over at Seeley Mudd Library. I knew Lee’s history, as a co-founder (with Edward L. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud) of public relations in America. I had never consulted an archive – but with an eye to finding some inspiration for my Ph.D. thesis, I decided to go take a look. What I found there changed my whole approach to understanding politics.
Readers looking to the past for inspiration about the possibilities of antitrust and progressive movements right now are being served a very weak and distorted account of what the most successful trust busters like Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson were actually trying to do and what they really accomplished. Kolko was a leader in exploiting primary sources that upended traditional accounts of who did what to whom.
So-called “New Brandeis” antitrust champions in particular overlook the realities of trust busting in American history and have much to learn from this masterpiece.
A radically new interpretation of the Progressive Era which argues that business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era's legislation regarding business.
As an economics student I was told that corporate merger would typically enhance financial performance, because of scale economies, market power or the acquirer’s superior management. As an auditor of recently acquired firms I found disorganization, demoralised staff, and weak profits. As a researcher I found that most mergers had failed to boost profitability, a finding that was mostly replicated by researchers over the subsequent 40 years. In the meantime, helped by my co-author, one of my aims has been to provide an explanation of this evidence, recounted in ‘my book.’ I’m an academic ‘lifer’ at Cambridge University – latterly Professor of Financial Accounting and Acting Dean of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.
This is not a book on techniques of accounting for M&A, but about why governments need to hold to account large companies seeking dominance of markets through M&A and other means.
It explores the socially harmful impacts of some mergers, such as exacerbating inequality and subverting democracy. It is rich in case evidence and combines law and economics in a vigorous, lucid critique of past governments’ permissive attitudes towards corporate merger. Wu has acted as Special Assistant to President Biden on competition policy.
From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.
We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms―big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality…
When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.
This is a classic reference for students learning microeconomic theory, both in economics and business degrees.
It offers a nice combination of motivating real-life examples, rigor, figures, and intuitive explanations.
Because it avoids mathematical details in most chapters, it is often used in introductory courses, helping get students “hungry for more” in next courses, such as intermediate or advanced microeconomics.
However, it assumes a bit more mathematical background than Krugman and Wells’ book (presented above), so it can be used as the main reference for introductory courses if students have some basic algebra.
Microeconomics and its role in decision making and public policy
Microeconomics exposes readers to topics that play a central role in microeconomics. From game theory and competitive strategy, to the roles of uncertainty and information, and the analysis of pricing by firms with market power, the text helps you understand what's going on in the world of business. It also shows you how microeconomics can be used as a practical tool for decision-making and for designing and understanding public policy. The 9th Edition further illustrates microeconomics' relevance and usefulness with new…
I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
A short presentation of consumer and producer theory (no game theory or contract theory), very rigorous, and with some interesting examples.
Challenging exam exercises at the end of the book. Last but not least, the eBook is available for free from Prof. Ariel Rubinstein’s website.
While most students may find it too succinct to be the only reference in PhD Microeconomics courses, it is probably one of the references several students use (seeking different explanations and examples) at top PhD programs.
This book presents Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes for the first part of his well-known graduate course in microeconomics. Developed during the fifteen years that Rubinstein taught the course at Tel Aviv University, Princeton University, and New York University, these notes provide a critical assessment of models of rational economic agents, and are an invaluable supplement to any primary textbook in microeconomic theory. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Rubinstein retains the striking originality and deep simplicity that characterize his famously engaging style of teaching. He presents these lecture notes with a precision that gets to the core of…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
An excellent game theory book for graduate students, especially for Master's students taking second-year elective courses on game theory, and even technical enough for the first-year Ph.D. Microeconomics course (since most schools spend most of the second semester covering game theory, contract theory, and applications.)
Rigorous, with detailed definitions and notation, yet accessible to senior undergraduate students at top schools (with a strong math background) or Master's students.
This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the principal ideas and applications of game theory, in a style that combines rigor with accessibility. Steven Tadelis begins with a concise description of rational decision making, and goes on to discuss strategic and extensive form games with complete information, Bayesian games, and extensive form games with imperfect information. He covers a host of topics, including multistage and repeated games, bargaining theory, auctions, rent-seeking games, mechanism design, signaling games, reputation building, and information transmission games. Unlike other books on game theory, this one begins with the idea of rationality and explores its implications for…
I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This book is highly recommended for students in graduate programs with a strong game theory and mechanism design focus.
As MWG, it is especially technical in some chapters, but its writing is more “modern” in Introductions and other sections, helping the reader “see the forest” a bit more easily than with other books. The math appendix is also excellent and exercises are a good challenge for strong students.
Interested in
game theory,
microeconomics,
and
economics?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
game theory,
microeconomics,
and
economics.
