A Case Study Involving The Telecommunications Industry

In business, market structure plays an important role, which helps to shape the competitive landscape for businesses at all levels. Each business industry will naturally form a market structure that comes in numerous forms: Perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, or monopoly. Verizon Wireless is a well-known communications company and large enough to affect the market. Oligopoly is defined as a market in which only a few firms dominate, and judging from Verizon competition there are only a few firms involve: T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint. With only few competitors involve the barrier to entry is high, but there still lies a large pool of customers. The barriers are high because of the amount of money that has to into the infrastructure

In the field of microeconomics, the market structure of an organization determines the performance of the organization within the industry. There are different types of market structures practiced today. Among these market structures include the perfect competition structure (Miller, Vandome, & McBrewster, 2009). In perfect competition structure, the competition happens between numerous small firms against each other. In this practice, there is optimum production by the firms socially at the minimum cost per unit possible. There is no barrier to entry in this structure, hence new companies and organizations can join easily. The

(Demand Under Perfect Competition) What type of demand curve does a perfectly competitive firm face Why

The organization and characteristics of a specific market where a company operates is referred to as market structure. While markets can basically be classified by their degree of competitiveness and pricing, there are four types of markets i.e. perfect competition, monopolistic competition, monopoly, and oligopoly. In perfect competition markets, many firms are price takers whereas monopolistic competition markets are characterized by the ability of some firms to have market power. In contrast, oligopoly markets are those in which few firms can be price makers while monopoly market is where one firm can be a price maker.

Carolinas Telco is today led by 11 Members of the Board of Directors, who serve as non-paid

In a perfectly competitive market each firm is a “Price Taker” , i.e. the prices and wages are determined by the market and the firm is so small relative to the size of the market that they can have no influence over the market price. For a market to be

Perfect competition is the complete opposite of a monopoly, this is where a single company supplies a particular service or good. This also means they can charge whatever price they want because there are no other options for the consumer.

1) Evaluate HTC’s performance as described in the case. What are its competitive assets and liabilities?

At one end is perfect competition where there are very many firms competing against each other. Every firm is so tiny in relation to the entire trade that has no power to manipulate price. It is a ‘price taker’. At the other end is monopoly, where there is just a single firm in the industry, and for this reason no competition from inside the industry.

Peter Nicholson wishes to convert the factory in the north east to production of the electric taxi. Using data in Appendix C, Table 1, calculate payback period and the average rate of return.

Oligopolistic Markets are less common, but still prevail in the modern economy. An Oligopolistic business is one with few competitors, basing its revenue off of “outsmarting” its opponents by analyzing their decisions and predicting the outcome. Having an analysis of an opponent provides the basis for Oligopoly, as income is based on providing a product that has more features than another product, released to the public around the same time. The Cellular industry provides a pristine example of the Oligopolistic Market.

Perfect competition: in this competition, no participant dominates the market thus; no specific seller has the power to set the prices of homogeneous goods. This therefore makes the conditions of a perfect competitive market stricter than the rest of the market structures. In this market, AT&T should be willing to sell their services in a certain price that reciprocates to their demand to maximize profits.

When only a few sellers offer a product with little regard to competition it is called an oligopoly. It is different from a monopoly because multiple corporations are involved, but the effects on the consumer are the same - bad. Although competition is usually in the best interest of the consumer, it is not always in the best interest of the corporation. If we examine the two leading soft drink producers, Coca-cola and Pepsi-cola, we see a prime example of an oligopoly (Zachary, 1999). As things are presently, each of these soft drink companies has about half of the soft drink market, and examined from a world-wide perspective that is a pretty large market. Either one of them, Coke or Pespi, could conceivably lower their prices in

a) In a perfect competitive market, the sole determinant of pricing is the market demand and the supply curves. A demand curve refers to the total amount that consumers will pay for their products. The supply curve is the total amount that the producers can actually make to supply to the company at the price they can afford or are willing to pay. Another factor in a perfect competitive market structure is the equilibrium price which is basically when the supply of the market meets the market demand of the consumers. Anther unique feature of a perfect competition market is that it is a price taker. In essence, this means that the company doesn’t have any influence on the price. Again, this can only be caused through a market that has a large number of firms with identical products. (Samuelson and Marks, 2010).

One step away from perfect competition is monopolistic competition. This type of market structure has a number of different characteristics from the above. Which turn it into one of the most used market structures. In this scenario, companies are not all price takers and start making use of economies of scale in order to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits. In the scenario companies sell a differentiated product at different prices. Like in perfect competition no barriers are put to entry and newcomers a constant threat to the market keeping every player always in search for a better mean to produce and compete.