There are, however, several features of Atkinson’s analysis that make it difficult to evaluate the generality of his result. First, he assumes that all firms are faced with downward-sloping demand curves shifting at a given rate Go over time. Each firm, however, can grow at a rate G Go by competing away other firms’ customers through advertising and other measures of sales promotion. The difficulty lies in the fact that G cannot be an equilibrium growth rate and the meaning of the long-run results remains therefore unclear. Second, to obtain a finite value of the firm, Atkinson assumes that the rate of the interest i exceeds the highest obtainable growth rate G. Apart from being highly restrictive this assumption is crucial for the result that the initially chosen scale of a CF exceeds the one of a comparable LMF (see Steinherr and Peer, 1975). More generally, the problem with a static treatment such as Atkinson’s is the following: either the firm’s growth performance deviates from the expansion rate of the market for only limited periods of time in which case it would be necessary to study the full time-path of the firm’s growth or, if the firm’s growth rate always exceeds the market expansion rate, then competitive market structures break down.