5 - Philip Andrews' theory of competitive oligopoly

Summary

In 1937, Philip Andrews arrived in Oxford as a postgraduate student and quickly became involved with the OERG, eventually assuming the position of the Group's secretary. In 1941 he became the chief statistician to the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey, and later in 1943 he became involved in the Courtauld Inquiry on the relationship between the scale of enterprise and efficiency. Initially Andrews, with the help of Elizabeth Brunner, investigated Courtaulds and other rayon manufacturers, but later the Inquiry was extended to include the boot and shoe industry. Early on in the Courtauld Inquiry, Andrews realized that his work on the rayon industry could lead to a book which examined the chances of small enterprises in British industry. In particular, he saw the book as a general report surveying the problem of how far the efficiency of an individual business was affected by its size and considering how far large-scale business did or did not enjoy real advantages which would not be available to smaller-scale businesses even with appropriate changes in the organization of industry and in the economic environment of business. The book would also pay special attention to the reasons for the survival of relatively small businesses in industries where they were important and thus indicate contributions that smaller-scale businesses made both to its own industry and to the economy of Great Britain as a whole.