Posts Tagged ‘Monopoly’

The Nature and Causes of Inflation

Thursday, March 24th, 2011


Developments, profits and wages both rise greatly, with the consumer paying the tab through much higher prices of $0.60 per kilogram. While sales of bejuniaberries will be somewhat lower at this higher price, the monopoly producer is in a position to hold down the output of berries, thus keeping the price at $0.60. When price increases originate in this way in the monopoly power of producers (either workers or businesses or both), the result is called cost-push inflation.

Obviously, there are two quite different problems here – demand-pull forces in one case, and cost-push forces in the other. Yet, they both can cause the same problem – rising prices and wages. Our examples have applied to increases in the price of a single product – bejuniaberries. Now, we will apply these two basic concepts – demand-pull and cost-push - to the more complex problem of inflation, in which the prices of goods and services in general are rising.

http://www.forexforexforexforex.com/

Free Auto Insurance Quotes

Choice Hotel Suites Winnipeg

Auto Dealers Surrey

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • CPI reveals that except for everything going up in price, there is no inflation Here's a great post from The Big Picture on the Consumer Price Index.Its so funny, I'm reproducing the whole post.CPI reveals that except for everything going up in price, there is no inflationOriginal: "Consumer prices surged last month on higher...
  • Gas below $2 The talk of deflation, a general decrease in prices, is now becoming more common. Wasn't it just a few months back that we were worrying about inflation and its cousin stagflation? But, I think the new fears are a bit...
  • Buying Acoustic Musical Instruments Online Acoustic instruments have been providing such wonders of sounds and melodies since before the Renaissance period. These instruments provide a quality of music that cannot be replicated by their electrical counterparts. Pianos, violins, guitars, learning to play an acoustic instrument...
  • Got any spare change? I was just sent a Time magazine article on student loans. It’s pretty grim. This year the amount owed on student loans will go over 1 trillion, dollars. It already exceeds the amount owed on credit cards. Even in the...


Natural Monopolies

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010


Despite the criticisms of monopolies, there are certain industries in which monopoly is the only logical form of organization. The best examples of this are public utilities and services: the public interest would not be served by having a dozen different companies providing gas, water, electricity, telephone service and local public transportation. The situation would be simply chaotic, which is why such industries are sometimes referred to as natural monopolies.

While monopoly is the only logical situation in such industries, there would be dangers in leaving such economic power in the hands of private businesses. As a result, natural monopolies are typically either nationalized (placed under government ownership and operation) or subjected to regulation of their prices. Sometimes their rates (prices) are regulated in such a way to permit the company to earn a certain rate of return on its shareholder’s investment, so as to be fair to both consumers and shareholders.

Many people believe that when natural monopolies are regulated by the government or by a board, these monopolies are therefore subject to control by the public. However, the matter or regulating monopolies is not as quite as simple as that. In order to regulate reasonably the prices to be charged by a natural monopoly, the people responsible for determining the regulations must possess considerable knowledge concerning that industry.

http://www.forexforexforexforex.com/

Capital Car Auto Dealer Transport Carriers

overtimeautoapprovals.com

24hourautofinance.com

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • Learn How To Employ Blogging To Develop Your Web Business Every online business, regardless of the niche, should have a blog these days in order to reach out to its target market. These tips are designed to help you get more from your blogging experience and build your brand better...
  • Should the USPS Become Its Own Business? America is the home of capitalism. If someone can do the same job for a better price, they're going to come out ahead. Why would anyone spend more for the same service? For a capitalistic nation, we have some weird...
  • Are You Sinking In Quicksand? Fear Holding You Back? Fear Is The Leading Cause Of  Failure It's doesn't matter what you are doing online, if you don't believe in yourself your vision will never be realized.  The first step to overcoming your fear is to admit you have them. ...
  • How to Determine if Rare Coin Prices Are Fair Having a great coin collection is something many people aspire to have. The objective for many is to have a collection of a certain kind of coin or a certain region of the world. Others will simply want to have...


Two Approaches

Thursday, September 30th, 2010


There are two related but different approaches to the exercise of monopoly power. One approach is to state the price of the product, then produce only as much as can be sold at that price. This approach is most suited to a manufacturing operation, in which a list price is often established for an entire year, and production levels are adjusted during the year to ensure that there is no overproduction of the product. This approach can be summarized as raising the price, then restricting the output.

However, not all producers can schedule their output quite so precisely. In the case of agricultural products, crop sizes vary with the weather and other circumstances, and cannot be tailored to suit a predetermined price – in such cases, there is a risk of overproduction driving prices downwards. To deal with this, producers sometimes hold part of their output off the market, so as to prevent prices from falling. In some cases, such as Brazilian coffee, part of a large crop is actually destroyed, while in other cases, such as Canadian wheat and industrial skim milk powder, it is put into storage, usually with the assistance of government agencies. This approach can be summarized as one of restricting the supply so that the price moves to a higher level on its own, in the marketplace.

http://www.forexforexforexforex.com/

Eagle Ridge GM

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • 30 Year Mortgages At 4.85%! Mortgage rates have hit record lows. You can get a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage for 4.85%. The 15 year is at 4.58%. I don't think mortgages have ever been this cheap. According to Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac chief economist, "The...
  • My Risky Private Stock Investment Pays Off... Sort of Before I started this blog, I was a software engineer. Seven years ago, almost to the day, I signed on to become employee #7 at a new start-up and, like many start-ups, I put in long hours designing much of...
  • New Year's 2010 Approaching Fast Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr New Year's 2010 is approaching fast. There are plenty of parties all around planned. We have always stayed home and spent New Year's Eve at home. It really isn't safe here in Upstate New York...
  • This is the Time that Fortunes are Made Last October I asked, where would you put money now. I noted that quite a few things were expensive. Investments that were at full time highs were: Oil, the Dow, the price of gold, emerging markets, and China. I finally...


Postscript

Sunday, September 26th, 2010


We have said that monopoly is defined as a situation in which there is only one seller of a particular good or service. This, however, is not as simple as it may seem. For example, each individual barbershop could be said to offer a unique particular service, because it has its own barbers with their own personalities, styles, its own magazines, location, and so on. Yet it would be silly to call each local barbershop a monopoly, because there are many competing barbershops within a reasonable distance – in short, one individual barbershop may possess certain elements of uniqueness and monopoly, but it does not have that degree of economic power over the consumer that we associate with monopoly. At the other end of the scale, consider the example of telephone services, a case that is generally considered to be a monopoly.

Even in this case, things are not so simple, because Bell (or your local phone company) does not have a complete monopoly of communications; there are other forms of communication available, even if these are not very close substitutes for telephone communications. So even Bell’s monopoly is not as pure as one might think.

So there is some element of monopoly even in highly competitive situations, and some element or competition even in highly monopolistic situations. There is probably no such thing as absolute monopoly, so in defining “monopoly” we have to fall back mostly on common sense. Thus, we could call Bell Telephone a monopoly, and we would not call a barbershop a monopoly.

http://www.forexforexforexforex.com/

Unlock iphone

overtimeautoapprovals.com

Furnasman One Hour Heating Cooling Services

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • Should Casual Bloggers Use WordPress or Google Blogger? One of the most popular hobbies and past times on the internet today has to do with setting up and maintaining your own blog. Blogging is all about creating an online journal or diary that people can read and comment...
  • Saving Money with your Phone There are a lot of different ways that you can cut down on what you spend in your household budget every month, and one such example is by saving money through how you communicate on the phone. Telephone services are...
  • Growing Popularity of Urban Gardening Among City Dwellers Economy is a web of interconnected systems that sustain one another. When one part of the economy suffers, it has a ripple effect. With gas prices on the rise again and affects of economic downturn still rampant in the US,...
  • My Progress on the Ten Financial Commandments for Your Twenties Every so often, I wonder if I'm on the right track financially.  It's hard to gauge your progress sometimes, when you don't have benchmarks.  Luckily, Kiplinger's has put out a list of ten financial commandments for those of us in...


Product Differentiation

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010


The demand curve indicates that, while the firm could raise its price, the demand for its product is so elastic that it would be unprofitable to do so…too many sales would be lost. However, the firm in monopolistic competition is not always in such a helpless condition. To the extent that a firm can make its product or service different from those of its competitors its operations and its costs. Where can people with such knowledge and experience be found? One likely source is the industry itself, in the person of retired senior officials, such as executives and board members, of the company being regulated. Even if the regulators come from outside the natural monopoly being regulated, they must depend heavily for their information on the management of the company. Thus, the process of regulation is far from the clear cut, objective procedure it is often believed to be, since the people who impose the regulations are not (cannot be) uninfluenced by the corporation they are intended to regulate. This raises the question of whether regulatory boards can always be counted upon to act in the best interests of the consumer, or whether the interests of the producer might not take precedence, as has been suggested in the case of the regulation of the airlines. It is neither possible nor fair to generalize concerning the effectiveness of regulatory boards, since some seem to be much more effective protectors of the consumer’s interests than others.

http://www.forexforexforexforex.com/

Quality Inn Winnipeg Extended Stay Hotel

My Auto Leader

Eagle Ridge GM

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • Gold Jumps: Has It Become Correlated To The Stock Market? I've been an avid collector of gold and silver coins and have been following the prices for a years. Gold is supposed to have a negative correlation with the stock market. This year has proved otherwise. Of course, as we've...
  • MonaVie and FTC Guidelines A few times a week, I get an e-mail asking, "What ever happened to MonaVie and their legal multiple threats?" For those who are new to my site, here's the abridged version of the story. My wife went to a...
  • Do You Know These Highly Effective Niche Marketing Tips? Niche marketing has been a powerful force and tool that has enabled so many people to succeed. It seems that everything changes once you decide to engage in niche marketing. Given below are three niche marketing tips that you can...
  • Why Do You Bank Online? I stumbled on this article from BankRate: Should you bank online? and it got me thinking. Why do the people who bank online do it? The author of the article makes some good points about why customers prefer online banking,...


Oligopoly

Thursday, September 9th, 2010


Like perfect competition, monopoly is a quite rare situation, restricted to a relatively small proportion of the output of the economy. Of much greater importance and interest is the last of our four types of market structures – oligopoly, which accounts for an estimated 40 to 50 percent of the economy’s output. The figure shows the four types of market structure ranked according to competitiveness, and indicates roughly the relative size and importance of each.

Oligopoly refers to a situation in which a few sellers (or producers) dominate a market (or industry). More specifically, an industry is called “oligopolistic” if four (or fewer) producers account for 50 percent of more of the industry’s sales.

Behind this somewhat technical definition lie certain economic realities that are important to understand. When only a few firms dominate an industry, there exists the possibility that they will band together so as to increase their prices and profits. For such oligopolistic power to exist, it is not necessary that the industry consist of only four or fewer firms. As long as the dominant four firms account for half the industry’s sales, the rest of the sales could be split up among, say, twenty or thirty small firms. In these circumstances, the smaller firms would very likely follow the price set by the dominant firms, making the industry oligopolistic despite the presence of considerably more than four firms. Similarly, there could be hundreds of firms in an industry across Canada, but if they are fragmented into relatively small local markets with a few firms in each market, these markets will be oligopolistic. For instance, there are probably hundreds of road paving firms in Canada, but all do not serve a national market: if a municipality offers a contract for road paving, bids may be received from only four or five local firms, a situation than certainly looks oligopolistic. Thus, in deciding whether an industry is oligopolistic, the total number of producers is less important than the number that the buyer actually has to choose from.

This is the key point about oligopoly: unlike the competitive situations we looked at earlier, the buyer’s choice among sellers or producers is limited to a relatively small number. This, in turn, increases the potential market power of the producers – it increases their ability to raise prices. This is why oligopoly is placed next to monopoly.

http://www.albertajobshark.com/

Edmonton 2010 Mazda RX-8

Eagle Ridge GM

Furnasman One Hour Heating Cooling Services

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • Promoting And Advertising On Web Marketing on the web involves internet advertising to get in touch with potential users. It demands creativity similar to designing, development and specialised aspects similar to marketing and also advertising. Online marketing, email internet marketing, search powerplant marketing and interactive...
  • Understand More Information On Network Marketing According To A Virtual Assistant The virtual assistant tackles that the term network marketing possesses 2 different definitions. In general it's a synonym for multi-level marketing and frequently by accident regarded as exactly like a pyramid scheme. The thought of "network marketing" is often used...
  • Prosper.com Complaints Drop As Lending Program Raises Standards If you are considering peer-to-peer lending as an option for either investing or borrowing you would be wise to research the programs before making a commitment.  You may begin this research by performing a google search of Prosper.com or Lending...
  • Trade Like an O'Neil Disciple: How We Made 18,000% in the Stock Market (Wiley Trading) Trade Like an O'Neil Disciple: How We Made 18,000% in the Stock Market (Wiley Trading) How two former traders of William J. O'Neil + Company made mad money using O'Neil's trading strategies, and how you can, too From the successes...