----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
Is it not that, 'having hacked our way through the jungles' of 
cross-elasticity, production matrix and the like, 'we find old Marshall 
standing to wait us on the other side', as Robertson concluded about the 
typology of market competition? The problem has to do with the definition 
of a commodity, both on the supply and on the demand side. For the latter, 
think of Marshall's considerations about tea and its substitutes, and 
Friedman's remarks in his 1949 article. For the former, the right place to 
look at is Industry and Trade. What is more relevant, and here is where 
Becattini's analysis would be useful, is that the grouping of commodities 
is not the same when we look at markets from the two sides; that is, we 
have certain groups of commodities on the supply side (textiles, for 
instance, or leather), where production processes are similar, and 
different connections if we think of demand (Christmas shopping makes us 
realize that leather handbags are in competition with foulards, rather than 
with leather shoes). 
Lancaster's analysis is interesting because it decomposes commodities into 
bundles of wants (and this is how marketing strategies work). All this 
bears on the theory of value and is at the heart of Marshall's restriction 
to partial equilibrium and short deductive chains. Marshall tended to stick 
to the supply side, in terms of production processes, with joint - or 
better 'in common' - production as the rule,  and Andrews did the same in 
the essay I mentioned in my previous message. 
 
Tiziano 
 
 
 
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