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Many purchases that individuals make at the retail level are produced in markets that are neither perfectly competitive, monopolies, nor monopolistically competitive. Rather, they are oligopolies. Oligopoly arises when a small number of large firms have all or most of the sales in an industry. Examples of oligopoly abound and include the auto industry, cable television, and…

Think about the purchases you make.  Perhaps you’re buying groceries. Perhaps you’re going out to the movies or dinner. Maybe you’re making airline reservations for a trip. Maybe you’re buying a new car. Almost certainly, the industries you are doing business with are imperfectly competitive. They consist of more than one firm, but less than…

The combinations of price and quantity at each point on a firm’s perceived demand curve are used to calculate total revenue for each combination of price and quantity. This information on total revenue is then used to calculate marginal revenue, which is the change in total revenue divided by the change in quantity. A change…

The U.S. economy spent about $139.5 billion on advertising in 2012, according to Kantar Media Reports. Roughly one third of this was television advertising, and another third was divided roughly equally between Internet, newspapers, and radio. The remaining third was divided up between direct mail, magazines, telephone directory yellow pages, billboards, and other miscellaneous sources.…

If one monopolistic competitor earns positive economic profits, other firms will be tempted to enter the market. A gas station with a great location must worry that other gas stations might open across the street or down the road—and perhaps the new gas stations will sell coffee or have a carwash or some other attraction…

The process by which a monopolistic competitor chooses its profit-maximizing quantity and price resembles closely how a monopoly makes these decisions process. First, the firm selects the profit-maximizing quantity to produce. Then the firm decides what price to charge for that quantity. Step 1. The monopolistic competitor determines its profit-maximizing level of output. In this case,…

The monopolistically competitive firm decides on its profit-maximizing quantity and price in much the same way as a monopolist. A monopolistic competitor, like a monopolist, faces a downward-sloping demand curve, and so it will choose some combination of price and quantity along its perceived demand curve. As an example of a profit-maximizing monopolistic competitor, consider the Authentic…

The theory of imperfect competition was developed by two economists independently but simultaneously in 1933. The first was Edward Chamberlin of Harvard University who published The Economics of Monopolistic Competition. The second was Joan Robinson of Cambridge University who published The Economics of Imperfect Competition. Robinson subsequently became interested in macroeconomics where she became a prominent Keynesian,…

The U.S. antitrust laws reach beyond blocking mergers that would reduce competition to include a wide array of anticompetitive practices. For example, it is illegal for competitors to form a cartel to collude to make pricing and output decisions, as if they were a monopoly firm. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of…

Price Discrimination Throughout this text up to this point, we have assumed that firms sold all units of output at the same price. In some cases, however, firms can charge different prices to different consumers. If such an opportunity exists, the firm can increase profits further. When a firm charges different prices for the same…