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Stand up comedy industry Essay

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Title Stand-up comedy industry

Thesis 1: From an industrial organization point of view, the stand-up comedy market structure in the 1980s can be characterized as an oligopoly

“The structure of a market, thus how a market is functioning, “ is the concept behind the industrial organization theory”. The Industrial Organization (IO) theory is about, how a structure of a market has an influence on the strategy and decision making of a company.” 1 The theory therefore focusses on the market wherein the company operates and links the decisions of the company to the market. In the economic theory of industrial organisation, an industry can be defined according to several different criteria.2 According to Throsby, there are three …show more content…

In 1975 such a diachronic dialectic was found for the first time in de music industry by Peterson and Berger. They saw an active interaction/connection between small and large firms, which influenced the market. While the large firms were competing with each other, niches opened up and were filled by smaller firms.

But unlike the music industry and the American film industry (Mezias & Mezias, 2000), there is not a diachronic dialectic between small firms and large firms in the stand-up comedy industry.

According to the resource-partitioning theory, a theory conceptualized by Caroll in 1985, this dialectic exists when the big firms are competing with each other. Just a few of these generalists survive and they move forward toward the centre of the market. Because of this movement small pockets of resources open up, where smaller firms can thrive (Vermeulen & Bruggeman, 2000).

However, in the stand-up comedy industry it is difficult to underestimate large and small firms, instead we distinguish comedians and the media they use to reach their audience. Hence it weren’t large firms causing the opening of the niches for smaller firms. Instead it has been the increase of the use of media over the past couple decades that has stimulated the creative industry of stand-up comedy.

The last fifty years booms

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