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An Oligopoly Market Essay

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Introduction It cannot be denied that oligopolies are widespread all over the world. The Cambridge Dictionary (2016) defines oligopoly as ‘a situation in which a small number of organizations or companies have control of an area of business, so that others have no share’. An example is the smartphone market are dominated by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. It has been reported that the market share of Android is nearly 80 percent, while iOS’s market share is about 15 percent in 2015 (Olenick, 2015). The main characteristic of oligopoly is the interdependence of firms, which leads to strategic uncertainly. Companies need to consider their rivals’ possible reactions when setting price and output so there is not a known outcome. Basically, there are many models that can analyse this uncertainly such as Cournot Model and Stackelberg Model. In this essay, I will outline the nature of uncertainly in an oligopoly market in which firms set output levels, then use different models to analyse this uncertainly as well as examine the influence of a cartel.

Oligopoly uncertainly It is believed that firms have to take into account the actions of customers and other producers to any shift in price and output thus it gives rise to oligopoly uncertainly. Consider a market in which the companies confront the identical market price. Let the inverse market demand curve be p = p(q) = p(qA + qB). Firm A needs to consider the impact of its output on the market price to determine its profits

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