The Representative Firm

Abstract

Marshall's idea of 'representative firm' was created to reconcile his dynamic view of individual firms with the static view of industries. But this idea was somewhat nebulous and did not last very long in the economics literature. Marshall first wrote about the representative firm in his "Principles of Economics" published in 1890 but the idea was driven out of the literature by 1928, when it was replaced by A. C. Pigou's idea of the 'equilibrium firm'.