CHAMBERLIN, EDWARD HASTINGS

born May 18, 1899, La Conner, Wash., U.S. died July 16, 1967, Cambridge, Mass. U.S. economist known for his theories on industrial monopolies and competition. Chamberlin studied at the University of Iowa, where he came under the influence of the economist Frank H. Knight, and pursued graduate work at the universities of Michigan and Harvard. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard (1927) and spent his academic career there. It was from his Ph.D. thesis that his Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1933) emerged. From this book springs the majority of subsequent discussions of competition between firms where consumers have preferences for particular products and where firms have control over the prices of their products without being monopolists. The solutions which Chamberlin reached are mathematically identical, for the most part, to those reached by British economist Joan Robinson at Cambridge, whose work was published the same year. But it is Chamberlin's work which is full of insight into the workings of an economy in which firms actively compete, and he was responsible for the introduction of the term product differentiation into the literature. Even though Chamberlin's work did not solve the problems associated with interdependence between firms, it was a major landmark in the development of the theory of industrial competition.