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" Monopolistic competition is a challenge to the traditional viewpoint of economics that competition and monopoly are alternatives and that individual prices are to be explained in terms of either the one or the other. By contrast, it is held that most economic situations are composites of both competition and monopoly, and that, wherever this is the case, a false view is given by neglecting either one of the two forces and regarding the situation as made up entirely of the other. This seems to be a very simple idea. Indeed if one is not quite set in the way of thinking which involves mutual exclusiveness, it is grasped at once."


 * &mdash;Edward Chamberlin, Monopolistic or Imperfect Competition?, 1937

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