Industry Total Cost Functions and the Status of the Core
研究了行业总成本函数与核心非空的关系，发现标准需求下竞争均衡要求规模报酬非递减，因此具有U形平均成本或平底平均成本的行业无法实现竞争均衡。
The industry total cost function gives the least total cost to an industry of producing a prescribed total output. For standard demand schedules where price and quantity vary inversely, a nonempty core requires nondecreasing returns to scale. Because a nonempty core is necessary for a neoclassical competitive equilibrium, this means an industry can be in a competitive equilibrium only if it has nondecreasing returns to scale. Thus, industries in which the firms have identical U-shaped average cost (Viner industries) or flat-bottomed average cost do not satisfy this condition so they cannot have a competitive equilibrium for arbitrary standard demand schedules. Copyright 1991 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.