An oligopoly is a market in which pricing control lies in the hands of a few sellers.
In economics, specifically general equilibrium theory, a perfect market, also known as an atomistic market, is defined by several idealizing conditions, collectively called perfect competition, or atomistic competition. In theoretical models where conditions of perfect competition hold, it has been demonstrated that a market will reach an equilibrium in which the quantity supplied for every product or service, including labor, equals the quantity demanded at the current price. This equilibrium would be a Pareto optimum.
In economics, industrial organization is a field that builds on the theory of the firm by examining the structure of firms and markets. Industrial organization adds real-world complications to the perfectly competitive model, complications such as transaction costs, limited information, and barriers to entry of new firms that may be associated with imperfect competition. It analyzes determinants of firm and market organization and behavior on a continuum between competition and monopoly, including from government actions.
X-inefficiency is a concept used in economics to describe instances where firms go through internal inefficiency resulting in higher production costs than required for a given output. This inefficiency can result from various factors, such as outdated technology, inefficient production processes, poor management, and lack of competition, and it results in lower profits for the inefficient firm(s) and higher prices for consumers. The concept of X-inefficiency was introduced by Harvey Leibenstein.
From a legal point of view, a contract is an institutional arrangement for the way in which resources flow, which defines the various relationships between the parties to a transaction or limits the rights and obligations of the parties.
A complete contract is an important concept from contract theory.
In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service by manipulating either the supply or demand of the product or service to increase economic profit. In other words, market power occurs if a firm does not face a perfectly elastic demand curve and can set its price (P) above marginal cost (MC) without losing revenue. This indicates that the magnitude of market power is associated with the gap between P and MC at a firm's profit maximising level of output. The size of the gap, which encapsulates the firm's level of market dominance, is determined by the residual demand curve's form. A steeper reverse demand indicates higher earnings and more dominance in the market. Such propensities contradict perfectly competitive markets, where market participants have no market power, P = MC and firms earn zero economic profit. Market participants in perfectly competitive markets are consequently referred to as 'price takers', whereas market participants that exhibit market power are referred to as 'price makers' or 'price setters'.
Leapfrogging is a concept used in many domains of the economics and business fields, and was originally developed in the area of industrial organization and economic growth. The main idea behind the concept of leapfrogging is that small and incremental innovations lead a dominant firm to stay ahead. However, sometimes, radical innovations will permit new firms to leapfrog the ancient and dominant firm. The phenomenon can occur to firms but also to leadership of countries or cities, where a developing country can skip stages of the path taken by industrial nations, enabling them to catch up sooner, particularly in terms of economic growth.
Jean-Jacques Marcel Laffont was a French economist specializing in public economics and information economics. Educated at the University of Toulouse and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE) in Paris, he was awarded PhD in economics by Harvard University in 1975.
Regulatory economics is the application of law by government or regulatory agencies for various economics-related purposes, including remedying market failure, protecting the environment and economic management.
Screening in economics refers to a strategy of combating adverse selection – one of the potential decision-making complications in cases of asymmetric information – by the agent(s) with less information.
Bengt Robert Holmström is a Finnish economist who is currently Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together with Oliver Hart, he received the Central Bank of Sweden Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
Mathias François Dewatripont is a Belgian economist and professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies is a book by Market Platform Dynamics founder David S. Evans and MIT economist Richard L. Schmalensee published in 2007.
In economics, profit is the difference between revenue that an economic entity has received from its outputs and total costs of its inputs, also known as surplus value. It is equal to total revenue minus total cost, including both explicit and implicit costs.
Frederic Michael Scherer is an American economist and expert on industrial organization. Since 2006, he continues as a professor of economics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.
Drew Fudenberg is a Professor of Economics at MIT. His research spans many aspects of game theory, including equilibrium theory, learning in games, evolutionary game theory, and many applications to other fields. Fudenberg was also one of the first to apply game theoretic analysis in industrial organization, bargaining theory, and contract theory. He has also authored papers on repeated games, reputation effects, and behavioral economics.
Toulouse School of Economics is a school of economics, affiliated with Toulouse 1 Capitole University, a constituent college of the Federal University of Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées. It is located in the city of Toulouse, France.
A Markov perfect equilibrium is an equilibrium concept in game theory. It has been used in analyses of industrial organization, macroeconomics, and political economy. It is a refinement of the concept of subgame perfect equilibrium to extensive form games for which a pay-off relevant state space can be identified. The term appeared in publications starting about 1988 in the work of economists Jean Tirole and Eric Maskin.
David Martimort is a French economist and Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. Martimort is one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of contract theory. His research has been awarded the Best Young French Economist Award in 2004.
