Three Characteristics Of A Perfectly Competitive Market

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A perfectly competitive market has three main characteristics; there are many buyers and sellers, goods are homogenous and there is free entry and exit into and out of the market. The reason to there being many buyers and sellers is because perfectly competitive firms operate at an efficient scale, which means a high consumers surplus, and because sellers can sell as much quantity as they like at the given market price. It's not desirable for sellers to decrease the price of their goods as this would reduce their profits, they also have no incentive to increase prices as this would lead them to have no demand, as consumers have perfect market knowledge and are able to purchase close substitute goods. Each firm operating in this market is known …show more content…

Monopolists are able to maximize their profits by selling a quantity of their good where marginal costs is equal to marginal revenue, but set a price where this equilibrium meets the demand curve. However, a monopolist isn't desirable for consumers as they create a deadweight loss. (Shown below)

The third type of market structure is an oligopoly. This type of market can be seen as being imperfect (where as a monopoly and competitive markets can be seen as being perfect). There are only a few sellers who dominate this type of market, all of which sell similar goods- an example being supermarkets, which are dominated by Tesco, Sainsburys and ASDA. All of these firms could be seen as being price makers, therefore any action by one of the firms can affect the levels of profits for all the other firms operating in that market.

Firms operating in this market would be able to profit maximize if they tried to act like a monopoly market structure. Although, this may involve collusion which is seen as becoming efficient, but antitrust laws are set in place to prevent this from happening.( An example of collusion within supermarkets, was when they agreed to price fix milk in 2007.) However, because firms are not allowed to agree on prices and quantities of goods, firms in a oligopolistic market aim to increase their market share and become market leader, therefore they increase their output which has the effect of reducing prices. This means they are unable to profit

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