Market Structure In Economics

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The economy this word comes from a Greek word called “oikonomos”, which means “one who manages a household” (Mankiw et al., 2013, p. 1). A household consists of one or more people that staying under the same roof, who shares their meals together and living place. However, some household may only consist of a single family or grouping of people who are friends. When comes to the economics field, there is a market structure. The market structure can affect the price of a firm to charge on their products in the industry. The market structure can be defined as the number of firms that produce identical goods and services in the market. In general, the market structure can be categorized into four: perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly and monopolistic…show more content…
Monopoly can be divide into two which is pure monopoly and natural monopoly. The monopolist in pure monopoly can control the market by provides the good and services that there have no any replacement which decide by buyers. To maintain its position in the market, the monopolist sure will control the output level to manipulate the whole market. According to Chew and Chew (1999) stated that “this market structure can be characterized by there is no close substitutes for the product produced by the monopolist and there are high barriers to entry into this market” (p.101). The second type is natural monopoly which is “the costs of products in a firm are cheaper than the total the cost of products in two or more different firms with same amount of output” (Ruffin & Gregory, 1997, p. 194). Monopoly can be exist in the market because the monopolist has protection by government through patents, public franchises, and ownership of scarce factor of production. The government protects by using patents, so that, the monopolist have a long period to avoid from competition. For example, to protect those small invention, Patent Ordinance System was carried out by Japan since 1885 (Kotabe, 1992). “Government grant franchises to a company to provide sugar, oil, gas and water because it is more efficient than having scores of competing companies” (Slavin, 1988, p. 250). Petronas is…show more content…
There are many sellers in monopolistic competition but not as many as the perfect competition(Deviga Vengedasalam & Karunagaran Madhavan, 2010) . Although there are many sellers in monopolistic competition, but the size of their firm is small. The firms sell the different product, but the product sell by the firm are with a close substitute which means if the price of the product rise the consumer will choose the other product. Monopolistic competition markets have a few barrier to enter and leave unlike perfect competition which is free to entry and exit (Deviga Vengedasalam & Karunagaran Madhavan, 2010).The firms can control the price of the products. In the short run, supernormal profit, subnormal or normal profit can earn by the monopolistic firms whereas, in the long run, the monopolistic firms only can earn a normal

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