I wanted to give this book the title ‘Applied price theory’. Unfortunately, none of my referees liked it. Nor did my editor, Patrick McCartan. They all thought it was oldfashioned, vague, imprecise and whatnot. So I gave in and went for ‘Applied industrial economics’, hoping that my readers will realize that I, as always, am interested in the links between ‘theory’ and ‘reality’, where ‘reality’ refers to observed behaviour as well as antitrust policy, while ‘theory’ refers to particular products or markets.

My introduction is rather long and aims at explaining the logic behind my choice of contributions. Since I am aiming mainly at advanced undergraduates, I tried to start from scratch and define the basic concepts and results in a totally non-technical way. Yet, I did not try to unify the notation of the chapters, nor did I delete technical appendices or proofs: students must learn to switch from one notation to another and should be given the opportunity to work themselves through the technicalities. Intuition is not enough.

I am grateful to John Sutton for encouragement and moral support and to Andrew Lewis, Andrea Lofaro, and Stephen Martin for comments on my introduction.

Jessica Spataro, my secretary, had the brilliant idea of scanning the papers. As a consequence, she had to retype all the maths and unify the typographical presentation.