Page 26 - 4228

The absence of perfect competition in most markets led to a search
for a more realistic alternative to evaluate performance in specific
instances. Among the best-known alternatives is the concept of
"workable" competition, developed by the American economist John M.

Clark in 1940. Clark recognized that in most industries the number of
business firms is not so great as to preclude an individual firm from
having some power to influence market prices and conditions.

In addition, participants rarely have complete knowledge of market
conditions. According to Clark, however, departures from the ideal of
perfect competition often are not great enough to warrant government
intervention into the market (through antitrust action or direct

regulation) in order to improve the situation.
Competition may be workable in the sense that the results achieved
are roughly comparable to what is supposed to happen under the

theoretical ideal of perfect competition. The chief drawback to the
workable-competition concept is its vagueness; no precise criteria have

been developed to determine when workable competition actually exists.

3. ENGINEERING Chemical engineering

This branch of engineering is concerned with the design,
construction, and management of factories in which the essential

processes consist of chemical reactions. Because of the diversity of the
materials dealt with, the practice, for more than 50 years, has been to
analyze chemical engineering problems in terms of fundamental unit
operations or unit processes such as the grinding or pulverizing of solids.

It is the task of the chemical engineer to select and specify the design
that will best meet the particular requirements of production and the
most appropriate equipment for the new applications.

With the advance of technology, the number of unit operations
increases, but of continuing importance are distillation, crystallization,
dissolution, filtration, and extraction. In each unit operation, engineers
are concerned with four fundamentals: (1) the conservation of matter;

(2) the conservation of energy; (3) the principles of chemical
equilibrium; (4) the principles of chemical reactivity. In addition,
chemical engineers must organize the unit operations in their correct

sequence, and they must consider the economic cost of the overall
process. Because a continuous, or assembly-line, operation is more
economical than a batch process, and is frequently amenable to

25