First edition. 8vo. 275, [1] pp. Original grey cloth, spine and front cover lettered in blue (small amount of heavy spotting to rear endpapers, otherwise internally clean, some light wear to extremities, a good copy). Philadelphia, The Blakiston Company, 1949.
An applied study by the distinguished Austrian-American economist Fritz Machlup (1902-1983) of the geographic pricing strategy known as the ‘basing-point system’ whereby companies determine a fee for a good sold, plus an additional freight charge that is calculated based upon the customer’s distance from a starting, or ‘basing point’. The system had proved controversial at the time of publication in relation to various antitrust laws and Machlup argued in favour of the policy of enforcing uniform f.o.b. mill pricing on industries which practice basing point pricing. The book is very much representative of Machlup’s works on industrial organisation and effectively forms a part of his larger study on the Economics of Price Discrimination (1949).