A commonality between Joan Robinson and Ludwig von Mises

The paper demonstrates significant overlap between Joan Robinson’s treatment of international price discrimination (or dumping) in The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) and Ludwig von Mises treatment of international price discrimination, which he refers to as a type of margin monopoly, in Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949).

Robinson used graphs in her analysis of price discrimination.  There is not one graph in Human Action, yet the present paper will use graphs to demonstrate the overlap.

Despite the overlap, Mises does not reference Robinson even though Robinson’s book preceded his book by sixteen years.  The paper considers possible reasons why Mises does not reference Robinson.  Perhaps Mises did not wish to credit Robinson since their ideologies were diametrically opposed. Robinson was a Cambridge economist, who wrote a classic book on imperfect competition, was a Keynesian in macroeconomics, and also wrote extensively on Marxian economics. Mises was an Austrian economist, associated with the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, and staunch free market advocate. Or Mises may have genuinely considered his analysis different from or better than Robinson’s.  Margin monopoly was one of six types of monopoly that Mises distinguished, and perhaps he considered his classification unique on its own account.

Another aspect of the comparison is that Robinson used comparative statics in her discussion of price discrimination. Comparative statics is not an analytical tool that Mises embraced, since he generally focused on human action in disequilibrium. Nevertheless, as can be shown, his case of margin monopoly lends itself to comparative statics.