Self-organized Agglomerations and Transport Costs

This paper investigates the number and structure of spatial equilibria in a continuous space for a general class of transport cost functions. The economic space is represented by a circumference on which Þrms and workers-consumers are perfectly mobile. We derive the conditions to be imposed on the transport cost functions under which the distributions of workers and Þrms are stable equilibria. We also derive the conditions under which discrete distributions of workers over equidistant points (cities) are stable equilibria for large and small number of points (cities).