Structure-Conduct-Performance: A Comment on Blaug's ''Is Competition Such a Good Thing? Static Efficiency versus Dynamic Efficiency'

Blaug (2001) airily announces that the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm of yesteryear has been superseded by game theory and transaction cost on one hand and by the Chicago School of Richard Posner and Robert Bork on the other hand. This judgement that structure-conduct-performance has been superseded strikes one as, at the very least premature. The merit of the structure-conduct-performance model is precisely that it premises that behavior is dependent upon the context in which the behavior occurs. The structure-conduct-performance model is not a straightjacket, but rather a tool for organizing the scientific study of particular problems.