Gardiner Means Resurrected the 1930's Theory of Administered or Oligopolistic Pricing to Explain Inflation

On the other side of the fence are, among many others, John Kenneth Galbraith and Gardiner Means.

Means has resurrected and refurbished for the purposes of explaining the inflation from 1955 to 1958 the theory of "administered prices" or "oligopolistic pricing" in "concentrated industries" which he had helped, most prominently, to develop and to make popular in the 1930's. Then the theory was used to explain the rigidity of the prices of the concentrated, oligopolistic industries (mainly steel, machinery and vehicles, other metals and metal products, chemicals, fuel, and power). The failure of these prices to fall, or to fall as much as other prices, was put forward as one of the strategic factors responsible for the severity of the depression. In the 1950's, the alleged upward flexibility of these same prices was made responsible for the 1953-57 or 1958 phase of the inflation.

--Gottfried Haberler, Inflation: Its Causes and Cures (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Association, 1960), 40-41.