Browse our Free Essay examples and check out our Writing tools to get your assignments done.
Some
suggestions for reviewing a journal article
You
have to write a critical review of the article,
and NOT just a summary of the article.
You
may organise your review in the following way:
• Provide information about the
article, such as title, author, name of the journal, year of publication, etc.
• Provide a clear summary of the
article by discussing the issues such as the motivation or main purpose of the
article, the methods used for the analysis, the main findings of the analysis,
the economic reasons for the results and the contributions to the literature.
• Write a critical evaluation of
the article. For example, you may do the following wherever applicable: discuss
how important are the issues discussed, how relevant are the methods used, how
important are the results compared to the existing literature, are the results
driven by some crucial assumptions and if so, how sensible are the assumptions,
what are the limitations of the analysis, how the analysis could be extended to
incorporate some ignored aspects of the economy and what possible results we
may expect from this extension, is there any paper that already extended the
analysis.
• Discuss the strengths as well as
the weaknesses.
• When you are providing critical
arguments, e.g., discussing how different assumptions or economic aspects which
have been ignored in the article may affect the findings, always support your
arguments with evidences, such as citing other articles or books. Always try to
cite academic references rather than web addresses.
• Summarise your review with an
overall assessment and mention how it helped to improve our understanding of
the topic.
It may
be useful to ask the following questions when reviewing:
What
are the research questions?
Why is
it important to consider these questions?
What
are the methods used to analysis the problem? Are these methods reasonable?
What
are the results? Are these results sensible?
What
are the reasons for the results?
How
important are the results compared to the existing literature?
What
are the issues ignored in this article? How the results may change if we
include certain ignored aspects? Are there papers which already extended the
analysis?
What
are the overall contributions of the article? How did it increase our knowledge
about the subject?
The following link
may be useful: https://academicskills.anu.edu.au/node/492
The
journal article on ‘Free entry and social efficiency”
Name
Institution/Affiliation
Word
count: 1420
The
journal article on ‘Free entry and social efficiency” was written by Gregory
Mankiw and Michael Whinston, it was published in 1986 by Wiley on behalf of the
Rand Corporation. The authors were inspired
by the writings and findings of previous articles that researched and compiled
evidence on the existence of the possibility of socially inefficient levels
that affects firms trying to enter new markets. According to Mankiw and
Whinston (1986, p. 48), this article
focuses on the identification of fundamental and spontaneous forces that affect
and influence entrant firms. The entry in
a market results in the already existing firms to act by reducing production
levels; entry is desired more by entrant
firms as compared to the incumbent firms. The authors argue that the biases
regarding entry results in the depiction of tendencies towards excessive entry,
most especially in homogeneous product
markets. Besides, the article examines the role played by integer constraint as
well as product diversity on both entrant and incumbent firms. Mankiw and
Whinston (1986, p. 48) state that “economists typically presume that free entry
is desirable for social efficiency,”
notably because the underlying economic forces of entry biases remain somewhat
mysterious.
The primary purpose
of this journal article is to investigate the fundamental economic forces that
determine whether the free-entry of firms is excessive, insufficient, or
optimal. Further, it addresses the question of the conditions that influence
the establishment of entry bias, by focusing on the outcome realized after
post-entry phase. The method of analysis in this article is based on the comparison of the entrant firms
during free entry of a specific number of
socially acceptable firms by a social planner who fails to control those firms
after initial entry. The analysis method is highly reasonable as it focuses on
comparing the specific firms desired by a welfare-maximizing social planner
with the particular entrants firm
entering the market freely (Manhiw & Whinston, 1986, p. 50). A two-stage game supports this analysis. As a
consequence, the authors try to put into consideration the most straightforward way of coming up with a
welfare-maximizing number of firms bearing in mind their non-competitiveness
after entry.
The
importance of this research questions is
that the authors get to focus on the development of a post-entry game model to
determine how free entry is desirable for social efficiency. Ahlbrecht and
Eckhert (2013, p. 638) argue that this approach is advantageous as it explains
the forces behind entry biases as well as provide ways that can be used to
check the entry biases. The main findings of this article based on the two-stage post entry game model are very
sensible. The results of using the model
to investigate the effect of homogenous product markets and product diversity
on the direction of free entry indicate that it a must for entrant firms to
incur costs during entry. A maximizing welfare number of firms do not
result from free entry. These findings
contribute significantly to economic literature as they reveal that economists
hold the hope that set-up costs would reduce thus effectively removing the entry regulations. These findings depict a connection with the already existing
literature that supports that as efficiency decreases
as free-entry equilibrium converges to a first-best
allocation.
A critical assessment on the journal article reveals that the authors’ utilized crucial assumptions in concluding their findings. The first assumption stipulates how the post-entry equilibrium aggregate...
