Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Firm Behavior In The Mid-Twentieth Century American Steel Industry”, Robert Rogers

The Journal of Economics and Politics

In the period from 1920 to 1972, the American steel industry consisted of eight large companies and a fringe composed of small domestic producers and foreign firms exporting to the United States. The market structure made it unlikely that the industry behaved in a perfectly competitive fashion. Thus, oligopoly hypotheses on firm behavior such as Nash-Bertrand and Stackelberg leadership seem plausible. This paper estimates a BLP demand model for the industry, and it, then, uses the demand parameters to estimate price equations under the different behavioral assumptions. From the information in this model, tests are made to see which hypothesis …