Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
An oligopoly (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few' and πωλέω (pōléō) 'to sell') is a market in which pricing control lies in the hands of a few sellers. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] As a result of their significant market power, firms in oligopolistic markets can influence prices through manipulating the supply function .
The emergence of oligopoly market forms is mainly attributed to the monopoly of market competition, i.e., the market monopoly acquired by enterprises through their competitive advantages, and the administrative monopoly due to government regulations, such as when the government grants monopoly power to an enterprise in the industry through laws ...
Profit maximization using the total revenue and total cost curves of a perfect competitor. To obtain the profit maximizing output quantity, we start by recognizing that profit is equal to total revenue minus total cost (). Given a table of costs and revenues at each quantity, we can either compute equations or plot the data directly on a graph.
A monopolist can set a price in excess of costs, making an economic profit. The above diagram shows a monopolist (only one firm in the market) that obtains a (monopoly) economic profit. An oligopoly usually has economic profit also, but operates in a market with more than just one firm (they must share available demand at the market price).
Joseph Louis François Bertrand (1822–1900) developed the model of Bertrand competition in oligopoly. This approach was based on the assumption that there are at least two firms producing a homogenous product with constant marginal cost (this could be constant at some positive value, or with zero marginal cost as in Cournot).
Classical economic theory assumes that a profit-maximizing producer with some market power (either due to oligopoly or monopolistic competition) will set marginal costs equal to marginal revenue. This idea can be envisioned graphically by the intersection of an upward-sloping marginal cost curve and a downward-sloping marginal revenue curve ...
Mathematically, the markup rule can be derived for a firm with price-setting power by maximizing the following expression for profit: = () where Q = quantity sold, P(Q) = inverse demand function, and thereby the price at which Q can be sold given the existing demand C(Q) = total cost of producing Q.
Notice that at the profit-maximizing quantity where =, we must have = which is why we set the above equations equal to zero. Now that we have two equations describing the states at which each firm is producing at the profit-maximizing quantity, we can simply solve this system of equations to obtain each firm's optimal level of output, q 1 , q 2 ...