9.0 Introduction
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, learners will be able to:
- Explain sources of monopoly
- Describe monopoly price and output
- Recognize how monopoly reduces efficiency
- Discuss government policy toward efficiency
Many believe that top executives at firms are the strongest supporters of market competition, but this belief is far from the truth.
In perspective
Think about it this way: If you very much wanted to win an Olympic gold medal, would you rather be far better than everyone else, or locked in competition with many athletes just as good as you? Similarly, if you would like to attain a very high level of profits, would you rather manage a business with little or no competition, or struggle against many tough competitors who are trying to sell to your customers? By now, you might have read the chapter on Perfect Competition. In this chapter, we explore the opposite extreme: Monopoly.
If perfect competition is a market where firms have no market power and they simply respond to the market price, monopoly is a market with no competition at all, and firms have a great deal of market power. In the case of a monopoly, one firm produces all of the output in a market. Since a monopoly faces no significant competition, it can charge any price it wishes, subject to the demand curve. While a monopoly, by definition, refers to a single firm, in practice people often use the term to describe a market in which one firm merely has a very high market share.
Attribution
“9.1 How Monopolies Form: Barriers to Entry” in Principles of Microeconomics by Dr. Emma Hutchinson, University of Victoria is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
