Group items tagged

This article talked about the oligopolistic competition in smartphone market. Several firms such as Apple, Android, Microsoft and Nokia controls more than 80% of market share. It is a very typical oligopoly market structure. And we can see firms are colluding and competing. Microsoft and Nokia formed alliance to compete against Apple. Microsoft also kept releasing new product, such as the Windows Phone 7 last fall. Smartphone market is very centralized and competitive.

This is an example of perfect competition that we don't normally think of, the banking sector. 

In theory perfect competition hinders innovation. As small firms produce homogeneous products for the same price the motivation for innovation decreases. However, a society needs innovation. It is through innovation that businesses grow and better the future. For example, the creation of the internet, cars, and electricity. When a market has its firms create similar products at the same price , firms will be less likely to innovate products.

 Sony has managed to get rid of the competing technology,the HD DVD.   Instead of an increase gain in market share,Sony has had a decrease in  market share. The reason is that people are savvy to the pricing strategies that vendors use. They understand that with no competition, Sony will eventually have to lower its own price.  In taking out competition Sony has caused a decline in its own products.

This article talked about how an Iceland company Carbon Recycling International ehf, saw the rising demand and planned to increase output. It made the firm more efficient because recycling carbon reduced cost and saved resources. It also reflected the situation of perfect competition. Oil companies are price takers, they can't control the price of oil. And the product are homogeneous: oil form different company don't have significant quality difference.

This article is interesting because it talks about the chain affect of low supply. The articles talks about how the global failure to harvest maize and soya is causing the supply of pig-feed to be low. This causes the price of pig feed to increase and makes it hard for farmers to continually purchase it. This isn't only affecting the farmers, but it is affecting the public. Farmers can't maintain healthy pigs so the supply of pork and ham decreases, which causes the price to increase. This means people aren't as willing to buy pork and ham. The competition between the large amounts of farmers also doesn't help the supply of pig-feed.

Education is both a public good and a private good. A public good is defined by two characteristics: non-excludability and non-rivalry. Public goods are for everyone and there is no competition for the good. Most people believe that a higher education is a pure public good but it is not. Society benefits when people get a higher. education. Statistically people with a college education tend to be more active citizens and their volunteering.with their volunteering and other activities benefiting those around them. Also statistics have shown that more new products and services are available to society because of the contributions of college graduates. These are the positive externalities of education. The negative aspect of education is  that even though the benefits of higher education are shared the costs for higher education are not shared. A higher education benefits society but the cost of a higher education proves a problem for those that want a higher education. Students themselves do reap some benefits: they are likely to be better off- both financially and otherwise-than their compatriots who do not go to college. However, students do not benefit as much as society. Therefore education is both a private and a public good.

This article discusses the duopoly in the telecommunication industry here in the UAE, Etisalat and Du. the article clearly points out the fact that both companies over charge, stating that internet here costs 50% more, when compared to internet pricing in the UK. This market was a monopoly, dominated by Etisalat but the entering of DU is said to be rapid and thus they are suffering from some diseconomies of scale. The way the article concluded was quite interesting as it stated that the Abu Dhabi government subsidized it's airline industry so that people could visit and enjoy lower rates, and then says it should keep the broadband cost more competitive so that it can attract the companies of tomorrow

This article states that no streaming service will ever be perfect because of the intense competition between these services. They are trying to join together with cable networks in order to gain more consumers.

In the old days there wasnt really monopolies they were mostly quasi-monopolies. The government owned enterprisis and there were not really private sectors and only customers were the one that was suffering but since the old days are gone most of things changed. They believe that monopolies are preffered by consumers and companies instead of competition. The developing technology is a great factor in a way of helping firms to advertise their product to convince people or take people's attention to buy the product. The advertisements and the high prices of products convince people to buy the product because they trust the price and the trusworthiness of the firm.

This article first reminds the reader how theoretical perfect competition is so monopolies are inevitable. It goes on to talk about how there are benefits of having monopolies like Google. 

The demand for the product increase by the main factor which is called appearance of the product.The designers by coming up with unique ideas make the products uniqe and highly desitred by making them interesting. The internet is a great access to determine which type of products are in need and highly desired also the eye pleasure of customers take a great role in designing.Therefore, if the designers increase demand of consumers and make more profit they would pay amount of money to make it better and make people to buy the product so the desing of the products in corporation with the internet access increase the competition between firms and they will all consider the appearance of their products that they sell and willn try to get the most of the profit.

The justice department of the Untied States has filed charges against Standard & Poor's, the largest credit ranking agency, for its involvement in the 2008 financial crisis. The article mentions how our current market, where three large credit agencies have had a sort of monopoly over the market, contrasts with the ideal form of perfect competition (where firms move freely but within certain rules). The author suggests however that the Federal Reserve may have had an equally significant role in the economic collapse, and by not acknowledging its own faults may give off a very poor image to the public.

Blackberry may change from communicators to computers in order to save their company. There are too many competition and they feel like this is the best resort to take.

This article talked about how Apple broke the monopoly in computer industry controlled by Microsoft. 14 years ago Justice Department worried that without government intervention, consumer choice would be significantly limited by Microsoft. However, today Apple broke this monopoly and took a big share of market. By using non-price competition and creating innovative product, Apple survived and succeed in computer industry. So we can see there is no such thing as a monopoly in computer industry, the advancement of technology will always give the market to the firm.

this article is a good example of terms of trade, and i think it is an important one because it is talking about one of the more developing countries. This article is also rather interesting because there are several graphs included which could be used in an IA.

This article is a fairly recent article that talks about international trading. Particularly, it talks about a free trade agreement that will soon be finalised between countries that could potentially represent 1/3 of global output. This free trade agreements seeks to reduce barriers in some countries allowing for easier trade and aims to increase the share of knowledge between the countries, trying to make the knowledge similar to a perfect competition scenario. However this agreement may lead to the alienation of power-house China, a heavily influential country that had not been invited to join the agreement. this could have potential backfires such as trade embargos, but for now we will have to wait and see.

This article discusses how quotas should be in place to protect the alaskan fish. it also brings up the recent government shut down and how that affected this. basically american fishers were limited to when and where they could fish. This in turn has affected the economy but decreased their competitiveness in the world economy

I also worked on this topic as my part of my IA commentary. This article from the NY times explains the rising power of certain beer companies that have acquired a large amount of the market. This, according to the article, has created a sort of oligopoly. Monopolies and oligopolies are severely watched by the government because they do not want only a few companies to dominate the market. In the article they explain that these oligopolies are testing the presidents tolerance.

The article is talking about some giant beer companies that merged together but had some issues with price decisions because the prices were too high for consumers and they were not able to afford the prices. Even though it was hard to agree for each company the high prices encouraged them for competition and the industry got better. On the other hand the rising prices also pushed companies for oligopoly because as they come together pricing strategies, the division of labour would be easier and more effective.

Safari is still by far the largest browser in the industry, but there are other browsers that are still in the competition. Examples of these competing browsers are Opera Mini which accumlates around 12.72% and Android Browser which amounts to 22.82%. Safari still holds 55.41%. These three big firms have huge control over the browser industry.