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Monopolistic competition vs oligopoly
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Varun Vasudeva BBA.LLB 13’ 20131365 OLIGOPOLY Contents: Thesis ( A factual brief for the research paper) Introduction Domination Types and Aspects Thesis: Reasoning and analyzing a common and a well known form of a modern day market, OLIGOPOLY. Adjudging the ways of their profit maximization and equilibrium attained via cooperation and competition. Introduction: An industry in which a few big firms dominate the other firms is called an Oligopoly. An average oligopoly might have a dozen firms or even hundreds of them but most of them hardly matter in relevance to other huge firms. These big firms usually dominate the market and make the so called structure called as oligopoly. The firms in such a market structure tend to react to changes made in quantity produced and prices by other competing firms in different manners. Due to such changes, all the firms tend to sell homogeneous or differentiated products. When the firm happen to choose their mode of production individually, they tend to fall somewhere between perfect competition and monopoly through the following ways: The quantity of output produced by the oligopoly is greater than the level produced by a monopoly but less than the level produced by a competitive market. The oligopoly price is less than the monopoly price but greater than the competitive price (which implies that it is greater than the marginal cost). Domination:- How do they dominate? The huge firms in an oligopoly have an role in determining the price of commodities and deciding the modes of production. On the other hand, the small firms survive with these giant firms in the same market by selling the products which the larger firms are not willing to sell. Occurence: There are certain reasons behi... ... middle of paper ... ...ly, however, that Pepsi or Coke know with perfect certainty how their rival will react to the current strategy. They do have, however, some general sense of what is most likely to occur and they take into account this anticipated response when they design their current competitive strategy. I would like to return on the rowboat analogy. When you stand up for the first time in the small rowboat, perhaps the two other passengers yelled at you with scowled looks on their faces. As a consequence you must have sat down not wanting to incur the wrath of your fellow passengers. Ten minutes later you think to stand up for the second time but you decide to stick to your seat because of the repeated interactions and events that happened in the past. You are able to take these interactions into account happened before as you decide what to do—or not do—in the current moment.
with a concentrated market share, an example of an oligopoly today. would be Nike, Reebok and Adidas for shoes. Most industries today are oligopolies, the possible reasons for this. would be that oligopolies in contrast to monopolistic competition. would be able to earn abnormal profits in the long run as well as the short run, as shown in the previous section.
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. Although firms in oligopolies have competitors, they do not face so much competition that they are price takers (as in perfect competition). Hence, they retain substantial control over the price they charge for their goods (characteristic of 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.
In a monopolistic competitive market the product of different sellers are discerned on the basis of brands. Here the product differentiation given rise to an element of monopoly to the producer over the competing product. As such the producer of the competing brand could increase the price of the product knowingly well that the brand loyal customers are not going to leave them. This is possible as here the products have no effective substitutes. How ever since all the brands are of close substitutes to one another the seller would lose some of their customers to these competitors. In the past many companies have faced the trouble of having a bag full of customers and due to close-fitting .competitors they end up only having a few. Most entrepreneurs fell that fronting their competitors is the toughest part of running a business in a monopoly market. Thus the monopolistic competitive market is a mixture projecting out both monopoly and perfect competition.
There are four basic market structures: perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition and oligopoly (Sheeba, 2012). First, let’s look at the two extreme ends of the spectrum. A perfect competition market exists, when there are several firms that are present in a market who all produce identical products and are all sold at market price. None of the producers in the market can control the price and the demand curve is perfectly elastic. The entry
The essential factor of an oligopolistic firm is interdependence. Oligopoly involves few producers, which means more than one producer as it is in pure monopoly but not so many as in monopolistic competition or pure competition where it is difficult to follow rival firms’ actions. Therefore, due to small number of producers on oligopoly market, the price and output solutions are interdependent. As a result, firms can cooperate or come to an agreement profitable for everyone. Therefore, they can increase, as it is possible, their joint profits (Pleeter & Way, 1990, p.129). Further, oligopoly is divided on pure, which is producing homogeneous products, and differentiated, producing heterogeneous products (Gallaway, 2000). Economists Farris and Happel insist that the more the product is differentiated, the more firms become independent, and the more the product differentiation, “the less likely joint profit maximization exists for the entire group” (1987, p. 263). Consequently, it is worth to be interdependent.
Monopolies formed all over the country in steel, oil, and railroad companies. These big businesses made it very difficult for other businesses to prosper in the same field. Document F clearly illustrates the direct effects of the monopolies: "They are monopolies organized to destroy competition and restrain trade. Once they secure control of a given line of business, they are master of the situation and can dictate to the two great classes with which they dealthe producer of the raw material and the consumer of the finished product. They limit the price of the ra material so as to impoverish the producer".
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.
There are four major market structures; perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, and monopoly. Perfect competition is the market structure in which there are many sellers and buyers, firms produce a homogeneous product, and there is free entry into and exit out of the industry (Amacher & Pate, 2013). A perfect competition is characterized by the fact that homogeneous products are being created. With this being the case consumers have no tendency to buy one product over the other, because they are all the same. Perfect competitions are also set up so that there is companies are free to enter and leave a market as they choose. They are allowed to do with without any type of restriction, from either the government or the other companies. This structure is purely theoretical, and represents and extreme end of the market structure. The opposite end of the market structure from perfect competition is monopoly.
In the short run, oligopolies are. able to earn abnormal profits, but in the long run as well they are. able to sustain abnormal profits due to the barriers to entry and exit. Then the s The barriers act as a strong deterrent to firms that want to come in. the industry and " eat into" the abnormal profits and then exit the market.
For a monopoly to maximise profits it must have an equilibrium point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, there is no reason for a firm to move from this equilibrium point because they are fulfilling their market plan. Using Figure 1 (Stewart, 2005) it can be explained why a monopoly firm would advertise. Marginal cost is fixed and is the line MC and demand is line D, marginal revenue is line MR. As the firm wishes to profit maximise it sets output at level Qm where marginal revenue crosses marginal cost, this means price is set at Pm where the quantity reaches the demand curve. If a firm is going to advertise it is likely that it will cause demand to shift to the right, this is because more people are going to buy the product when it is being sold at the same price.
With there being several firms for 3 of the markets, the consumer benefits as they can find the cheapest producer, resulting in the producer being at a disadvantage as they could loose business. In a perfect competition market, the firm is unable to choose the price whereas in an oligopoly the price is chosen by the firm this is beneficial for the producer as it increases their profit margins. However, this is harmful for consumers as they will have to pay the higher prices.
An oligopolistic market has a small number of sellers dominating market share and therefore barriers to entry are high. These sellers are highly competitive and do not act independently of each other. Access to information is limited so sellers can only speculate of their competitor’s actions. Sellers will take advantage of competitor’s price changes in order to increase market share.
The type of firm we are going to investigate in this assignment is an oligopolistic firm. The essence of an oligopolistic market is that here are only a few sellers. As a result, the actions of any one seller in the market can have a large impact on the profits of all the other sellers. Oligopolistic firms are interdependent in a way that competitive firms are not. The company we chose to study is Petronas.
Analysis of profit oligopoly identical as monopoly profits: in the short term it can get positive, zer...