On 28 July 2004, the Foundation signed a research agreement with Professor Jordi Jaumandreu Balanzo to carry out research entitled Análisis competitivo de los mercados (Competitive Analysis of Markets), which will result in a book to be published in English by a commercial publisher and in Spanish in the Foundation's Economics and Business Collection. The first part of the research was carried out at the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
Competitive market analysis has become central to many areas of economic policy, e.g. competition, regulation, supporting innovative business activities or maintaining the competitiveness of economic sectors. As a consequence, a broad movement has been initiated to develop models and techniques of analysis and their application to concrete cases.
Professor Jaumandreu's work offers an orderly overview of models, techniques and applications, in accordance with the high technical level required by the subject, incorporating the latest developments. In the first part, he discusses how it is possible to identify, by means of econometric techniques, the behaviour of firms and market equilibrium, as well as the basic models used for homogeneous and differentiated product markets. The latter, which constitute the bulk of any advanced economy, are currently the subject of intense development, even with conflicting methodological proposals.
The analysis with fully dynamic models is just beginning but will become one of the main references in the coming years. In the second part, the main applications of these models are systematically reviewed in areas such as the welfare impact of innovations, the analysis of the effects of mergers or the degree of competition in a given market, the effect of vertical relationships and contracts between wholesalers and retailers supplying the market, and the analysis of the needs and impacts of various forms of regulation and market entry.
