Market Structure and the Durability of Goods
比较竞争市场与垄断市场中商品的耐用性，在放松规模报酬不变假设后，分析最优耐用性是否独立于产出水平，并发现特定外部规模不经济下垄断者会生产更耐用的商品。
This paper compares the durability of goods produced in competitive and monopolistic markets. Durability is chosen to minimize the cost of providing a given present value of flow of services over the life of the durable. As pointed out by Swan, under constant returns to scale, the cost-minimizing durability is independent of the level of output; thus competitive firms will choose the same durability as a monopolist, even though they would produce different levels of output. In this paper, we relax the assumption of constant returns to scale and derive more general conditions under which optimal durability is independent of the level of output. We also demonstrate that with a particular specification of external diseconomies of scale, the monopolist will produce goods with greater durability than would be produced by competitive firms.