First edition. 8vo. xii, 352 pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (contemporary ownership inscription to front free endpaper, recent neat pencilled ownership inscription of Hon. Stanley C. Wisniewski to the front pastedown, contents otherwise generally clean; the cloth remains bright with only trivial shelf wear to tips of spine and corners; the rare dust jacket has benefitted from professional restoration under our direction with small loss to tips of spine panel and along the top edge of rear panel expertly filled in, sensitive reinforcement to joints and turn-in folds, notwithstanding a very presentable example). London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1933.
Robinson's seminal work of microeconomics, complete with a modestly restored example of the vanishingly rare original dust jacket.
'The most widely known of Joan Robinson’s works is still the first, The Economics of Imperfect Competition. It was the book of her youth, which placed her immediately in the forefront of the development of economic theory. It is a work conceived in Cambridge, at the end of a decade characterised by an intense controversy on cost curves and the law of returns. With this controversy in the background, Joan Robinson’s book emerges in 1933 as a masterpiece in the traditional sense of the word. The book had appeared almost simultaneously with the Theory of Monopolistic Competition by Edward Chamberlin (1933) and the two books are normally bracketed together as indicating the decisive breakaway of economic theory from the assumptions of perfect competition' (New Palgrave).
