Market Structures

Market Structures

McConnell and Brue (2004) describe four market structures that companies align themselves with during the course of their corporate lives. This paper will give examples of the four market structures: Pure Competition, Pure Monopoly, Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly. Companies may move from market structure to market structure over the course of growth and time. This movement between structures may be the result of product changes, introduction of competition or consumer interests. This paper will describe one such company that has made the migration from structure to structure.

According to McConnell and Brue (2004), pure competition is "a very large number of firms producing a standardized product". This is the case with the corn industry. One example of a pure competition corporation is "Farmers Cooperative Association" (FCA). A Farmers' Cooperative Association is a group of farmers, at their convenience, who come together to form a co-op in order to: improve bargaining power; reduce costs; obtain market access or broaden market opportunities and improve product or service quality (Nebraska Department of Agriculture, n.d.) that would normally not be achieved as an individual farmer. In doing so each farmer pays a fee to the Cooperation. The Cooperation itself is normally a non-profit organization in that the profit is realized back to the members supplying the product. Pricing is determined by the Board of Trade and is typically not negotiable. Cooperatives can hold corn at the request of its members in order to obtain a better price. However, in today's farming environment it is common to sell the corn prior to even producing it (Tim Jimenez, personal communication, March 4, 2007). The federal government also controls the price to some extent by offering monies to farmers not to plant or plant more of a product which either raises the prices because supply is not available or lowers the price if there is an abundance of supply. What ever the price is in the end the farmer ends up taking it or referred to as "price takers" (McConnell and Brue, 2004). The farmers individually do not have the volume to effect price, but the group as a whole can have an effect.

In economics, a monopoly is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service (Wikipedia, 2007). In a monopoly, a single firm is the sole provider of a product or service. There are no close substitutes, so there is no competition.