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In the real world, a variety of factors — imperfect competition between producers, unpredictable behavior by consumers, practical limits on how quickly operations can ramp up and down — mean that prices don’t always behave the way simple models predict.

And if the blossoming of the literature on imperfect competition in the labor market in recent years is a guide, Myth and Measurement has been a tremendous success.

Rather, it looks like a strategy for an economy based on imperfect competition and unproductive bidding wars that generates higher incomes and even higher prices — in short, a recipe for inflation.

Fisman and Sullivan are at their best as intellectual historians, chronicling the evolution in economics from neoclassical models based on perfect competition and rational behavior to one that accommodates market failures resulting from imperfect competition, strategic behavior and irrationality.

The real challenge here isn’t to figure out the best way to regulate cable and phone companies in an environment of constrained capacity and imperfect competition, which is what net neutrality is meant to do.