The method used in this book was to formulate an analysis of markets and firm behaviour from historical evidence. This argument, I subsequently discovered, derived from debates in the 19th century about the setting of railway freight tariffs. Even rereading the book nearly 20 years later, I cannot escape feeling that for economists to avoid the question of why markets work the way they do is just bad science. Experimental evidence that their assumptions are descriptively inaccurate are noted but ignored. Specious respecifications of the utility-maximisation assumption are sometimes developed to pretend that the issues are being addressed.
Historical evidence is just collections of anecdotes.
Real evidence, say economists, is statistical. So they use statistics which are frequently inaccurate, subject to ongoing revision and assumed to be characterised by whatever properties are required by the analytical techniques used by the economist or econometrician. The book reported a theory of business and competitive strategy including an account of the conditions in which various market forms will prevail. The conclusion that price flexibility is not always rational in the sense of being compatible with business survival or the stable exchange of goods and services stems naturally from common observation but is given a clear explanation in the book. Oddly, though I started simulation modelling nearly 15 years ago in order to generate models of the arguments in this book and my Markets and Macroeconomics , the first such model was completed only a few months ago.