Anti-trust laws are legislation enacted to ensure fair competition, prevent monopolies, and restrict practices that restrain trade and commerce.
A cartel is a group of independent suppliers who band together to control prices and limit competition by restricting trade to their mutual benefit. This cooperation typically aims to maximize collective profits by regulating supply and prices.
The Clayton Antitrust Act is a landmark piece of legislation aimed at promoting fair competition and eliminating unethical business practices in the public marketplace.
Deadweight loss represents the cost to society created by market inefficiency, which can occur in different forms, such as monopoly pricing, externalities, taxes, subsidies, and scarcity pricing.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 via the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its main functions are to promote consumer protection and eliminate and prevent anticompetitive business practices such as coercive monopoly.
A free market is an economic system characterized by minimal or no government intervention, where prices are determined by supply and demand dynamics. It's an environment where transactions between buyers and sellers are governed primarily by mutual consent without external pressures from monopolies, cartels, or collusive oligopolies.
An imperfect competitor is a consumer or supplier who has the ability to control the price that it pays or is paid. This ability is usually tied to being large enough to constitute a large percentage of the demand or supply of a given good, thereby enjoying monopoly or monopsony characteristics.
An industrialist is an individual involved in the business of industry. The term evolved from the early industrial period, where large trusts and monopolies were formed by a group of business people referred to as industrialists.
A legal monopoly refers to the exclusive right granted to a company to offer a particular service or product within a specific territory. In exchange, the company agrees to have its policies and rates regulated.
Market failure occurs when the equalization of supply and demand fails to produce an efficient allocation of resources from a social viewpoint. Causes for market failure include external economies, incomplete or poorly enforced property rights, and monopolistic characteristics of suppliers.
A monopolist is a firm or individual entrepreneur that is the sole producer of a good and represents the entire market supply of that good. This exclusive control allows the monopolist to influence the price and quantity of the product in the market.
Monopoly refers to the control of the production and distribution of a product or service by one firm or a group of firms acting in concert, characterized by the absence of competition, leading to high prices and a general lack of responsiveness to consumer needs.
A natural monopoly occurs in an industry where the most efficient producer is a single entity, typically due to high fixed costs and significant economies of scale. Most natural monopolies are utilities or similar entities.
An oligopoly is a market structure characterized by a small number of large firms dominating the market. This structure lies between perfect competition and monopoly and encompasses industries like automobiles, airlines, and telecommunications.
