The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of the Structure-Conduct-Performance Paradigm

The Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm was the core framework of industrial organization for two decades, and had a significant impact on competition policy from the 1950s through the 1970s. This essay considers what made the SCP framework so influential in the United States, the shortcomings economists identified in the framework during the shift to the “new IO” in the late 1970s, and the lasting contributions that the SCP paradigm made on policy and the study of industry and competition.