In the controversy between Professor Chamberlin and Mrs. Robinson and their respective supporters concerning what Professor Chamberlin calls “monopolistic competition,” and Mrs. Robinson has named “imperfect competition,” neither side seems ever to have referred to Marshall's Industry and Trade. In the field of history of economic doctrines and analysis, only three writers seem to have given serious attention to the work. Two of these wrote before the publication of either The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, or The Economics of Imperfect Competition. The other, though he comes to the conclusion at which this paper also arrives, fails to mention a number of notions presented by Marshall in his analysis of markets under conditions less than perfectly competitive.
Industry and Trade is not mentioned in the report of the “Round Table on Monopolistic Competition” found in the American Economic Review of June, 1937. In addition—chronologically this series of articles should be put first—no writer participating in the Economic Journal's “Symposium” of 1930 mentions Industry and Trade, while Professor Sraffa mentions it only once in the famous article which is considered by some to have been the beginning of the “revolutionary” new approach. Professor Chamberlin makes no reference to Industry and Trade either in the text of, or bibliographies to, the fifth or sixth editions of The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, and Mrs. Robinson cites Industry and Trade only once, on a minor point, in The Economics of Imperfect Competition.