----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]