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monopolistic competition, market situation in which there may be many independent buyers and many independent sellers but competition is imperfect because of product differentiation, geographical fragmentation of the market, or some similar condition. The theory was developed almost simultaneously by the American economist Edward Hastings Chamberlin in his Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1933) and by the British economist Joan Robinson in her Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933).
The theory encompassed a variety of market phenomena, including product differentiation, a situation in which each seller carries goods that have some unique properties in the view of the consumer (brand names, special ingredients, accompanying customer services, etc.) so that the seller may be considered to have a partial monopoly. Also analyzed were oligopoly, which is characterized by an industry composed of a small number of large firms; discriminating monopoly, in which a given item is sold at different prices to different customers; and monopsony, in which there is a single (monopolistic) buyer. Because the bulk of business in developed capitalist economies is conducted under conditions of product differentiation or oligopoly, the enthusiasm with which the analysis was received was understandable. The theory, however, ran into difficult problems that prevented its integration into the body of economic analysis.
