Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
A monopoly, as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing. This contrasts with a monopsony which relates to a single entity's control of a market to purchase a good or service, and with oligopoly and duopoly which consists of a few sellers dominating a market. Monopolies are thus characterised by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit. The verb monopolise or monopolize refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors. In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus. Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry.
An oligopoly is a market in which control over an industry lies in the hands of a few large sellers who own a dominant share of the market. Oligopolistic markets have homogenous products, few market participants, and inelastic demand for the products in those industries. As a result of their significant market power, firms in oligopolistic markets can influence prices through manipulating the supply function. Firms in an oligopoly are also mutually interdependent, as any action by one firm is expected to affect other firms in the market and evoke a reaction or consequential action. As a result, firms in oligopolistic markets often resort to collusion as means of maximising profits.
The Walter A. Haas School of Business, also known as Berkeley Haas, is the business school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was the first business school at a public university in the United States and is ranked among the best business schools in the world by The Economist, Financial Times, QS World University Rankings, U.S. News & World Report, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. This evaluation is typically done at the economy-wide level, and attempts to assess the distribution of resources and opportunities among members of society.
Antoine Augustin Cournot was a French philosopher and mathematician who also contributed to the development of economics.
Avinash Kamalakar Dixit is an Indian-American economist. He is the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, and has been Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University, senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Sanjaya Lall Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
Randolph Preston McAfee is an American economist and distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he served as chief economist at Microsoft. He has also served as an economist at Google, vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the executive officer for the social sciences. He has taught business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics.
In economics, an inverse demand function is the mathematical relationship that expresses price as a function of quantity demanded.
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
David John Teece is a New Zealand-born US-based organizational economist and the Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Carl Shapiro is an American economist and academic who serves as the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. He is the co-author, along with Hal Varian of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, published by the Harvard Business School Press. On February 23, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Barack Obama intended to nominate Shapiro to his Council of Economic Advisers.
Gordon Rausser is an American economist. He is currently the Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Dean Emeritus, at Rausser College of Natural Resources and more recently, a professor of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. On three separate occasions, he served as chairman of the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, served two terms as Dean of the Rausser College of Natural Resources, and has served on the board of trustees of public universities and one private university. Rausser has been appointed to more than 20 board of directors of both private and publicly traded companies, including chairman of several of such boards.
Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.
Joe Staten Bain was an American economist associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Bain was designated a Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association in 1982. An accompanying statement referred to him as "the undisputed father of modern Industrial Organization Economics."
Fiona M. Scott Morton is an American economist who serves as the Theodore Nierenberg Professor at Yale School of Management. Her research in industrial organization has covered industries including magazines, shipping, pharmaceuticals, and internet retail. She served as associate dean of the Yale School of Management from 2007 to 2010, and she has won the school's teaching award twice.
Richard J. Gilbert is an American Economist, professor at UC Berkeley from 1976 to 2000, and founder of LECG Corp.. Richard ('Rich') Gilbert served as Deputy Assistant General in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in the White House from 1993 to 1995, and author of Innovation Matters: Competition Policy for the Knowledge Economy, published by M.I.T. Press. While serving for the United States Justice Department, Richard Gilbert led the development of Joint Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property. Currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Richard Gilbert was president of the Industrial Organization Society at University of California, Berkeley during his tenure and from 2002 to 2005 the Chair of the Economics department there. Professor Gilbert has taken special interest in Innovation, Organizational behavior, and Energy economics. Richard J. Gilbert now works as Emeritus from the University, as a consultant for Compass Lexicon and was on the Board of the East Bay College Fund Oakland Promise Association.
Daniel Lee Rubinfeld is an American economist specializing in public economics and law and economics. He is a professor of law at the New York University School of Law, as well as the Robert L. Bridges Professor Emeritus of Law and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of two textbooks: Microeconomics and Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts.
Ilya R. Segal is an economist who is currently Roy and Betty Anderson Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on microeconomic theory, particularly contract theory, mechanism design and auction design. His research interests include the design of competition policy, property rights, contracts, auctions, and other economic mechanisms. Segal has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and member of the Toulouse Network for Information Technology. His other awards include Compass Lexecon prize for “the most significant contribution to the understanding and implementation of competition policy,” a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Hoover Fellowship.
Jonathan Seth Kanter is an American antitrust attorney who has served as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division since November 16, 2021. Prior to this, Kanter worked as an antitrust attorney at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and in private practice.
