Pre-History (before 1890)

The first considerations on some of the topics just listed were already present in the Scholastics or especially in Richard Cantillon. We start with the classical economists here, but before examining their ideas it must be recalled that the present notion of perfect competition was fully defined only in the 1930s (Machovec 1995): before that, competition was treated as an activity, and competing meant undertaking strategies to obtain monopoly power, that is, the power to set prices so as to make positive extra profits. As we shall see, this conception of competition largely corresponds to the content of today’s IO.