Abstract

The category of «selling costs», introduced by Edward Chamberlin in "The Monopolistic Competition Theory", persuasively explains the enigma of resale price maintenance. However, selling costs are nothing other than a special form of Coaseian "transaction costs"; so, studying the nature of these costs help us to connect the most controversial problem of antitrust analysis with the dilemma of social costs and it can improve our understanding of how markets are created.