We are happy to offer a more consistently mathematical version of our textbook, Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Empirical Applications, now in its fourth edition (IO/4e). In that text, we have always had to face the difficult task of balancing the tension between making modern industrial analysis accessible to a wide spectrum of students while also presenting the formal abstract modeling that truly gives the analysis its power. The more overtly mathematical quality of this new version avoids this conflict. At the same time we want to reassure users of the IO/4e on two fronts. First, those whose students found even that text mathematically challenging should know that we are hard at work writing a version that is more broadly accessible. Second, in both the the new text here and the one under way, we have kept the organization virtually identical to that of IO/4e. This is, we plan to offer an alternative, less mathematical exposition of this same material. Those moving from IO/4e to either of these new texts will not face a change in organization.

我们很高兴为我们的教科书《产业组织：当代理论与实证应用》提供一个更为一致的数学版本，现已出版第四版（IO/4e）。在这篇课文中，我们总是要面对一个困难的任务：在使现代工业分析更容易为广大学生所接受的同时，还要呈现形式化的抽象建模，从而真正赋予分析以力量。这个新版本更明显的数学特性避免了这种冲突。同时，我们希望在两个方面让IO/4e的用户放心。首先，那些学生认为即使是那些在数学上具有挑战性的文本，我们也应该知道，我们正在努力编写一个更容易理解的版本。第二，在这里的新文本和正在进行的文本中，我们保持了与IO/4e几乎相同的组织结构，也就是说，我们计划提供一个替代的，较少数学解释的相同材料。那些从IO/4e迁移到这些新文本中的任何一个都不会面临组织上的变化。