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 unfair price raises. 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.
Monopolistic competition is a type of imperfect competition such that there are many producers competing against each other but selling products that are differentiated from one another and hence not perfect substitutes. In monopolistic competition, a company takes the prices charged by its rivals as given and ignores the impact of its own prices on the prices of other companies. If this happens in the presence of a coercive government, monopolistic competition will fall into government-granted monopoly. Unlike perfect competition, the company maintains spare capacity. Models of monopolistic competition are often used to model industries. Textbook examples of industries with market structures similar to monopolistic competition include restaurants, cereals, clothing, shoes, and service industries in large cities. The "founding father" of the theory of monopolistic competition is Edward Hastings Chamberlin, who wrote a pioneering book on the subject, Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1933). Joan Robinson's book The Economics of Imperfect Competition presents a comparable theme of distinguishing perfect from imperfect competition. Further work on monopolistic competition was undertaken by Dixit and Stiglitz who created the Dixit-Stiglitz model which has proved applicable used in the sub fields of international trade theory, macroeconomics and economic geography.
In economics, the crosselasticity of demand measures the effect of changes in the price of one good on the quantity demanded of another good. This reflects the fact that the quantity demanded of good is dependent on not only its own price but also the price of other "related" good.
In economics and business ethics, a coercive monopoly is a firm that is able to raise prices and make production decisions without the risk that competition will arise to draw away their customers. A coercive monopoly is not merely a sole supplier of a particular kind of good or service, but it is a monopoly where there is no opportunity to compete with it through means such as price competition, technological or product innovation, or marketing; entry into the field is closed. As a coercive monopoly is securely shielded from the possibility of competition, it is able to make pricing and production decisions with the assurance that no competition will arise. It is a case of a non-contestable market. A coercive monopoly has very few incentives to keep prices low and may deliberately price gouge consumers by curtailing production.
Monopoly profit is an inflated level of profit due to the monopolistic practices of an enterprise.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers. That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions. An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers' desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.
Predatory pricing is a commercial pricing strategy which involves the use of large scale undercutting to eliminate competition. This is where an industry dominant firm with sizable market power will deliberately reduce the prices of a product or service to loss-making levels to attract all consumers and create a monopoly. For a period of time, the prices are set unrealistically low to ensure competitors are unable to effectively compete with the dominant firm without making substantial loss. The aim is to force existing or potential competitors within the industry to abandon the market so that the dominant firm may establish a stronger market position and create further barriers to entry. Once competition has been driven from the market, consumers are forced into a monopolistic market where the dominant firm can safely increase prices to recoup its losses.
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'.
Marginal revenue is a central concept in microeconomics that describes the additional total revenue generated by increasing product sales by 1 unit. Marginal revenue is the increase in revenue from the sale of one additional unit of product, i.e., the revenue from the sale of the last unit of product. It can be positive or negative. Marginal revenue is an important concept in vendor analysis. To derive the value of marginal revenue, it is required to examine the difference between the aggregate benefits a firm received from the quantity of a good and service produced last period and the current period with one extra unit increase in the rate of production. Marginal revenue is a fundamental tool for economic decision making within a firm's setting, together with marginal cost to be considered.
Non-price competition is a marketing strategy "in which one firm tries to distinguish its product or service from competing products on the basis of attributes like design and workmanship". It often occurs in imperfectly competitive markets because it exists between two or more producers that sell goods and services at the same prices but compete to increase their respective market shares through non-price measures such as marketing schemes and greater quality. It is a form of competition that requires firms to focus on product differentiation instead of pricing strategies among competitors. Such differentiation measures allowing for firms to distinguish themselves, and their products from competitors, may include, offering superb quality of service, extensive distribution, customer focus, or any sustainable competitive advantage other than price. When price controls are not present, the set of competitive equilibria naturally correspond to the state of natural outcomes in Hatfield and Milgrom's two-sided matching with contracts model.
A business can use a variety of pricing strategies when selling a product or service. To determine the most effective pricing strategy for a company, senior executives need to first identify the company's pricing position, pricing segment, pricing capability and their competitive pricing reaction strategy. Pricing strategies and tactics vary from company to company, and also differ across countries, cultures, industries and over time, with the maturing of industries and markets and changes in wider economic conditions.
In economics, market concentration is a function of the number of firms and their respective shares of the total production in a market. Market concentration is the portion of a given market's market share that is held by a small number of businesses. To ascertain whether an industry is competitive or not, it is employed in antitrust law and economic regulation. When market concentration is high, it indicates that a few firms dominate the market and oligopoly or monopolistic competition is likely to exist. In most cases, high market concentration produces undesirable consequences such as reduced competition and higher prices.
Market dominance is the control of a economic market by a firm. A dominant firm possesses the power to affect competition and influence market price. A firms' dominance is a measure of the power of a brand, product, service, or firm, relative to competitive offerings, whereby a dominant firm can behave independent of their competitors or consumers, and without concern for resource allocation. Dominant positioning is both a legal concept and an economic concept and the distinction between the two is important when determining whether a firm's market position is dominant.
In competition law, a relevant market is a market in which a particular product or service is sold. It is the intersection of a relevant product market and a relevant geographic market. The European Commission defines a relevant market and its product and geographic components as follows:
- A relevant product market comprises all those products and/or services which are regarded as interchangeable or substitutable by the consumer by reason of the products' characteristics, their prices and their intended use;
- A relevant geographic market comprises the area in which the firms concerned are involved in the supply of products or services and in which the conditions of competition are sufficiently homogeneous.
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.
Total revenue is the total receipts a seller can obtain from selling goods or services to buyers. It can be written as P × Q, which is the price of the goods multiplied by the quantity of the sold goods.
The Cellophane paradox describes a type of incorrect reasoning used in market regulation methods.
Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp., 472 U.S. 585 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case that decided whether a dominant firm's unilateral refusal to deal with a competitor could establish a monopolization claim under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The unanimous Supreme Court agreed with the 10th Circuit that terminating a pro-consumer joint venture without a legitimate business justification could constitute illegal monopolization. However, its decision created an exception to the general rule that firms can decide with whom to do business absent collusion, sparking significant controversy about the appropriate scope of this exception. In a subsequent case, Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, stated that Aspen Skiing is "at or near the outer boundary of § 2 liability." Although its holding has been narrowed, this case's relevance remains contested, especially in the context of refusals to license intellectual property.
Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Servs., Inc., 504 U.S. 451 (1992), is a 1992 Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that even though an equipment manufacturer lacked significant market power in the primary market for its equipment—copier-duplicators and other imaging equipment—nonetheless, it could have sufficient market power in the secondary aftermarket for repair parts to be liable under the antitrust laws for its exclusionary conduct in the aftermarket. The reason was that it was possible that, once customers were committed to the particular brand by having purchased a unit, they were "locked in" and no longer had any realistic alternative to turn to for repair parts.
In microeconomics, a monopoly price is set by a monopoly. A monopoly occurs when a firm lacks any viable competition and is the sole producer of the industry's product. Because a monopoly faces no competition, it has absolute market power and can set a price above the firm's marginal cost.
