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4 market structures examples
Types of market structure and their strategies
4 market structures examples
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Forms of Industrial Organizations
Based on production and selling environment economists group industries into market structures. There are four basic market structures namely: (1) pure competition, (2) monopoly, (3) oligopoly, and (4) monopolistic. Differentiating factors of the four markets include, ease of entrance or exit, the number of firms within the industry, and availability of substitutions. It is not uncommon for a market to begin as one type of structure and evolve into another. The following paper will discuss the four different market structures as well as explain the life cycle and progression of the All-Optical Notebook Computer Industry
Pure Competition
Monopoly
Oligopoly
The third type of market structure available in today’s market industry is an Oligopoly. "An oligopoly involves only a few sellers of a standardized or differentiated product, so each firm is affected by the decisions of its rivals and must take those decisions into account in determining its own price and output" ( Brue & McConnell, 2004, p. 3,4). Examples of an oligopoly can be found in the petroleum industry. Shell and Texaco for example must consider a number of different factors when trying to increase revenue. Due to the limited number of petroleum companies in the market, companies must depend on low level sellers to make price adjustments weekly to capitalize on demand. As with most oligopolies some price variation is necessary to maintain healthy profits. Companies like Texaco and Shell should make note however that too much deviation in price can create an unstable product market. Many companies in an oligopolistic market will use consumer perks to assist with price deviation. Texaco and Shell, for example, offer incentives su...
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Business Week, 3601. P. 58-64. Retrieved November 1, 2008, from EBSCOhost database.
Brue, S. L. and McConnell, C. R. (2005). (16th Ed.). Economics: Principles, Problems, and
Policies. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.
Carvajal. D (2005). Water, bottled water everywhere. International Herald Tribune. Retrieved
November 1, 2008, from http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/11/business/wbwater.php
Keaten, Jamey (2000) De Beers Buffs Its Image retrieved from the internet on November 1, 2008
from http://money.cnn.com/2000/08/25/europe/diamonds/
Peterson, Wallace (2008) Monopoly, Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia
Retrieved from the internet on October 26, 2008 from http://encarta.msn.com
Stein, Nicholas, (2001) The De Beers Story retrieved from the internet on October 26, 2008
from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/02/19/29686
Rosental, David W., Twells, Richard T. Madcap Craftbrew & Bottleworks, Inc.: Zebra Beer - It's Not All Black and White. Miami University, 1999
Rivalry among established firms is fierce. There are several factors that illustrate this: established market players (6.1). The product is highly standardized and the switching costs of the customers are low. Players are aggressive (6.2)
Anheuser-Busch has been the nation’s largest brewer for more than 40 years. In the mid-1800’s Adolphus Busch became familiar with the beers of a small Bohemian town called Budweis. After immigrating into the United States he married into the Anheuser brewing family. In the 1870’s Adolphus Busch registered Budweiser as a trademark in the U.S. Adolphus Busch dubbed his company Budweiser, “the king of beers.” Budweiser is a registered trademark of the St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, One Busch Place, St. Louis, Missouri 63118-1852, which is the world’s largest brewing company. Budweis is a small brewing town in the Czech republic. The town has a 700-year-old history of beer brewing. The brewing company Budvar of Budejovice registered Budweiser as a trademark in Europe in 1895. Budvar’s Budweiser is considered by beer experts to be a greater beer than the American Budweiser. Czechs are very proud of the Budvar brewery and considers its beer to be a national treasure. In the days before a global marketplace, the American Budweiser and the Czech Budweiser have never really competed with each other. However, in the 1990’s with increased global competition in the beer market, this dispute over who actually owns the Budweiser name takes on increased importance. According to a 1958 agreement signed by the Czech government, brand names that denote geographic origin are protected. So the Czech government which owns Budweiser believes that they should be the only ones allowed to carry that name in Europe. However the United States did not sign that treaty in 1958, so they do not agree with this. They have decided that it was no longer necessary for them to have a trademark settlement to develop the American Budweiser business in Europe.
Deutsche Brauerei has been a family owned and operated corporation for 12 generations, which has created a high level of focus and control. Each generation has kept the management and operations processes relatively simple, centered on brewing practices and quality. Deutsche Brauerei’s rapid growth in recent years can be attributed to several factors. First and foremost, the company’s success is centered on the product itself, which has won numerous quality awards and is quite popular in Germany. Another contributing factor to the recent growth may have been a bit inadvertent. The purchase of new equipment in 1994, which was necessary as a result of a fire that destroyed the old equipment, allowed the company to increase brewing capacity and efficiency. Finally, Deutsche Brauerei’s decision to enter the Ukranian market in 1998 contributed significantly to the rapid growth. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. brought market reforms, and Deutsche Brauerei jumped on the opportunity to enter the fragmented beer industry, capture the large population and capitalize on the prime location in Europe. Lukas Schweitzer was savvy enough to hire local expert Oleg Pinchuk away from a competitor as the marketing manager, and Oleg was instrumental in building the business in Ukraine by securing accounts and implementing the field warehousing to support distributors. Deutsche’s beer was hugely popular in the Ukraine almost immediately, and volume sales more than offset the depreciation of the Ukrainian currency. Sales in Ukraine accounted for 28% of Deutsche’s total sales, and skyrocketed from 4,262 euros in 1998 to 25,847 euros in 2001.
Topic A (oligopoly) - "The ' An oligopoly is defined as "a market structure in which only a few sellers offer similar or identical products" (Gans, King and Mankiw 1999, pp.-334). Since there are only a few sellers, the actions of any one firm in an oligopolistic market can have a large impact on the profits of all the other firms. Due to this, all the firms in an oligopolistic market are interdependent on one another. This relationship between the few sellers is what differentiates oligopolies from perfect competition and monopolies.
This organization belongs to the oligopoly market structure. The oligopoly market structure involves a few sellers of a standardized or differentiated product, a homogenous oligopoly or a differentiated oligopoly (McConnell, 2004, p. 467). In an oligopolistic market each firm is affected by the decisions of the other firms in the industry in determining their price and output (McConnell, 2005, P.413). Another factor of an oligopolistic market is the conditions of entry. In an oligopoly, there are significant barriers to entry into the market. These barriers exist because in these industries, three or four firms may have sufficient sales to achieve economies of scale, making the smaller firms would not be able to survive against the larger companies that control the industry (McConnell, 2005, p.
... immediately decreasing the price of diamonds. Sometimes, as in the case with Soviet diamond being of the best quality, De Beers couldn’t always have it their own way and had to then negotiate lower selling prices from them to the Soviet buyers in order to restrict the Soviets from flooding the market with their own diamonds.
Beer was the first beverage to come into play in Standage’s book and was viewed as being responsible for global revolution. He discusses the history of beer while also presenting a story of the domestication of cereal
Kahn, Jeffrey P. "How Beer Gave Us Civilization." Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2013. Web. 27 Sept. 2016.
The oligopoly market is a few relatively large firms that have adequate to significant market power and that they recognize their interdependence. Each firm know that their choice of actions or changes in their outputs will have an effect on other firms and in response to the change, other firms will take actions accordingly to adjust therefore will affect its sales and revenue. (Thomas 428) To closely define, the oligopoly characteristics consist of (a) a few large dominant firms; (b) a product or services either standardized or differentiated; (c) firm’s decision on price and output affect the demand and marginal revenue of other firms in the market and vice versa; and (d) the entry barriers to become a dominant firm consist of substantial involvement of technology and economical terms. With these characteristics, there are usually as few as two and as many as ten firms that make up large market shares in any one particular industry.
Historically the personal computer (PC) industry has sold its products at reasonably high prices yet garnered only small profit margins. One reason for this is the high competition in the PC industry which led to competitive pricing among producers. Analyzing the competitive environment of the PC industry, it is evident that there is very little barrier to entry in this market. PC's have very low physical uniqueness and are made of standard components that require very little expertise to assemble.
There are many industries. Economist group them into four market models: 1) pure competition which involves a very large number of firms producing a standardized producer. New firms may enter very easily. 2) Pure monopoly is a market structure in which one firm is the sole seller a product or service like a local electric company. Entry of additional firms is blocked so that one firm is the industry. 3)Monopolistic competition is characterized by a relatively large number of sellers producing differentiated product. 4)Oligopoly involves only a few sellers; this “fewness” means that each firm is affected by the decisions of rival and must take these decisions into account in determining its own price and output. Pure competition assumes that firms and resources are mobile among different kinds of industries.
Agreeing with other industry members what price to charge is known as collusion. Collusion is defined as “Action in concert without any formal agreement… [it] is common when anti-monopoly legislation makes explicit agreements illegal or unenforceable. Its existence is [sometimes] extremely difficult to prove” Black et al (2012). Within this analysis, I will explain what collusion is, the different types, why firms may enter into this agreement, then outline a past example and finally explain why this silent or spoken agreement may break down. Collusive agreements or cartels may however be created by governments to protect and positively influence markets, examples of this are the US sugar manufacturing cartel (operating between 1934-74) and OPEC which is still in operation today.
The second market structure is a monopolistic competition. The conditions of this market are similar as for perfect competition except the product is not homogenous it is differentiated; thus having control over its price. (Nellis and Parker, 1997). There are many firms and freedom of entry into the industry, firms are price makers and are faced with a downward sloping demand curve as well as profit maximizers. Examples include; restaurant businesses, hotels and pubs, specialist retailing (builders) and consumer services (Sloman, 2013).
Introduction and Background The computer service industry can be broken down into several categories ranging from reseller to consultant. Entré Computers / Executive Business Machines Inc. (EBM) was a sales and service organization for typewriters at its inception in 1972. However, as the corporate market shifted its needs from typewriters to word processors to personal computers, so did EBM change its product line to meet that demand. Now they are trying to compete in a very competitive low margin industry. They are a small single location company with annual gross revenues of twenty million (USD). However, as the profit margin and price of their product continually drop at a rate of forty percent annually, it becomes more difficult to show increasing gross revenues. They will need to find a place in the market, a niche, to survive and effectively compete with larger internationally known corporations as well as small local companies that are very much like their own. Industry Structure, Competitors The market is extremely competitive price-searchers market; product is often sold below manufacture's cost just to maintain market share and brand loyalty. It is a competitive price-searcher market because of the low barriers to entry and no regulations in price. Firms in this market are faced with a downward-sloping demand curve. The sellers range from international organizations, which retain over twenty thousand employees, to very small local shops with as few as two workers. The low-end of the market could be considered a Natural Monopoly because the average costs of production are continually decreasing as a result of higher production, improved technology and increased competition. However, there is a high end of market that would be deemed an Oligopoly, because it consists of a small number of sellers due to a very high barrier to entry. Typically the differentiated products are custom-built solutions that can only be provided by companies of the size and stature of a big six consulting firm or an internationally know organization such as Oracle or SAS. There are very high barriers to entry to compete in this market since the clients to this product are looking for large-scale international support. In order to implement a sophisticated differentiated product like Oracle financials or SAP, a company needs to retain an enormous overpaid staff of software engineers to develop, support, and implement such solutions. Very few companies are capable of retaining and / or attracting the staff necessary to provide such solutions.