This paper reviews the market power gleaned from economic theory in the Australian agricultural chain. Despite the general analyses on agricultural supply chain, it will allow development of the institutional detail sufficient to reveal the nature and significance of market power in agricultural chains and how and why it ebbs and flows over time. The implications of this reviews are that attention should be focused on the supplier side, especially the distribution sector in the chain, not on the consumer side of the market. Future studies into market power issue in the Australian agricultural market should be analysed in the form of intensive case studies.
Australian Competition and Consumer commission, Submission to the Joint Select Committee on the Retailing Sector, Canberra. 1999.
2.
BainJ. S.“Relation of profit rate to industry concentration”, Quarterly Journal of Economics65, 293–324. 1951.
3.
BainJ. S.Barriers to New Competition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. 1956.
4.
BaumolW. J.SidakJ. G.Toward Competition in Telephony, Cmabridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 1995.
5.
BaumolW. J.PanzarJ.WilligR.Contestable markets: An uprising in the theory of industry structure, American Economic Review72, 1–15. 1982.
6.
BaumolW. J.PanzarJ.WilligR.Contestable Markets and the Theory of Industry Structure, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1982.
7.
GalbraithJ. K.American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, London: Hamish Hamilton. 1952.
8.
KinseyJ. D.SenaurB.KingR. P.PhumpiuP. F. (1996), “Changes in retail food delivery: signals for producers, processors and distributors”. Working paper 96-03, St Paul, Minnesota: The retail Food Industry Center, University of Minnesota.
9.
MasonE. S.“Price and Production Policies of Large-scale Enterprise”, American Economic Review29, 61–74. 1939.
10.
MasonE. S.“The current state of the Monopoly Problem in the United States”, Harvard Law Review62, 1265–1285. 1949.
11.
NightingaleJ. J.Evolutionary Processes and Revolutionary Change in Management, Marketing and the Competitive Process, EarlP.E. (ed) Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar: 8–46. 1996.
12.
PiggottR. R.“Elasticity of supply and the incentive for collusive buying”, Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics14 (2), 131–7. 1970.
13.
PiggottR. R.GriffithG.NightingaleJ.Market Power in the Australian Food Chain: Toward a Research Agenda, RIRDC. 2000.
