Blogging about Market Structures

In this final blog entry, market structures have been compared. By comparing the market structures we can see economically which structure makes the most sense to help both consumer and producer. Here are my findings:

	Perfect Competition	Monopolistic Competition	Oligopoly	Monopoly
Number of firms	Lots	Several	Very few	One
Freedom of entry	Unrestricted	Unrestricted	Restricted	Completely restricted
Nature of product	Undifferentiated	Differentiated	Both differentiated and undifferentiated	Unique
Implications for demand curve	Horizontal slope	Downward sloping but still elastic	Downward sloping and inelastic	Downward sloping, most inelastic
Average size of firms	Smaller firms	Small-Medium	Larger firms	Very large; only 1 firm
Possible consumer demand	Products with high demand	High demand	Low consumer demand for Oligopoly	Very low consumer demand for Monopoly’s
Profit making possibility	Slightly smaller due to #of firms	More possible, fewer firms	With very few firms, possibility of profit is high	Very high
Government Intervention	Low	Low	Medium-High	High
Possible performance of firms	Many firms can succeed since demand is high	Still allows for more firms to succeed	Possibility of largest firm to perform well is high	As long as government intervention doesn’t take possibility away, the firm can perform extremely well.

I have added the row "possibility of performance of firms" as I think it is important to compare which market allows for the most firms to be successful.