Understanding Companies and Markets

This path-breaking new textbook brings together the two key areas of business policy and industrial economics to provide students with a powerful new framework for understanding the factors which influence a firm's choice of strategy and the market consequences of these strategic choices.
An ideal text for students of business strategy and industrial economics. A lecturer's manual is available free of charge to adopters. Introduction. 1. Business Strategy: An Overview. 2. Industrial Economics: An Overview. 3. Company Objectives. 4. Company Management and Organisation. 5. Horizontal Expansion. 6. Vertical Expansion. 7. Conglomerate Expansion. 8. A Framework for Analyzing Markets and Competitiveness. 9. Costs. 10. Prices. 11. Product Differentiation. 12. Market Entry and Exit. 13. Multinational Companies. 14. Market Performance and Public Policy. Index. Bryan Lowes is Lecturer in Managerial Economics, Christopher L. Pass is Lecturer in Management Economics and Stuart M. Sanderson is Senior Lecturer in Business Policy all at the Management Centre, University of Bradford, UK. The aim of this path-breaking new text is to blend the relevant aspects of business policy and industrial economics to provide students with a powerful new framework for understanding how company strategy relates to the markets in which comanies operate. By bringing these two key areas together for the first time in a textbook, it provides a better understanding of the factors which influence a firm's choice of strategy and the market consequences of such strategic choices.
The book provides an exceptionally clear overview:.
* How companies decide on which businesses and markets to operate in, and the competitive strategies they can adopt to succeed.
* A description of the key features of markets and how they function, including supply and demand, market structure, buyer behaviour and others.
* The need to understand that business strategy is concerned with the formulation of long term plans which have economic, organisational, marketing and financial dimensions.
Carefully tested in wide course use by the authors, the approach that Companies and Markets takes will allow students of business studies and industrial economics to see the fundamental importance of markets to understanding the competitive and corporate strategies of businesses.