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A firm making profits in the short run will nonetheless only break even in the long run because demand will decrease and average total cost will increase, meaning that in the long run, a monopolistically competitive company will make zero economic profit. This illustrates the amount of influence the company has over the market; because of brand ...
[2] [3] Since a competitive market has many competing firms, a customer can buy widgets from any of the competing firms. [1] [4] [2] [5] Because of this tight competition, competing firms in a market each have their own horizontal demand curve that is fixed at a single price established by market equilibrium for the entire industry as a whole.
The main characteristics of monopolistic competition include: Differentiated products; Many sellers and buyers; Free entry and exit; Firms within this market structure are not price takers and compete based on product price, quality and through marketing efforts, setting individual prices for the unique differentiated products. [18]
Unlike perfect competition where firms can freely enter and exit the market, it is not the case for monopolistic competition. For a monopoly to exist, there must be high barriers to entry for new firms. Barriers to entry must be strong enough to discourage potential competitors from entering.
Average-cost pricing does also have some disadvantages. By setting price equal to the intersection of the demand curve and the average total cost curve, the firm's output is allocatively inefficient as the price is less than the marginal cost (which is the output quantity for a perfectly competitive and allocatively efficient market).
In the short run, economic profit is positive, but it approaches zero in the long run. Firms in monopolistic competition tend to advertise heavily because different firms need to distinguish similar products than others. [16] Examples of monopolistic competition include; restaurants, hair salons, clothing, and electronics.
Cars are a good example here; they are very different yet in direct competition with each other. This means there will be some customer loyalty, which allows for some flexibility for the firm to move to a higher price. In other words, not all of a firm's customers would leave for other products if the firm raised its prices. 2.
The correct sequence of the market structure from most to least competitive is perfect competition, imperfect competition, oligopoly, and pure monopoly. The main criteria by which one can distinguish between different market structures are: the number and size of firms and consumers in the market, the type of goods and services being traded ...