Microeconomics discussion reply | Economics homework help

REPLY TO MY PEER DISCUSSION AND WORD COUNT SHOULD BE MIN 150 

PHILIP,

Hello all, when it comes to finding a landscaper to cut your grass, you will have no problem finding someone and they will have no difficulty finding customers. This is a very COMPETITIVE MARKET. You could say the providers are a dime a dozen and they could say the same about customers. Other than a few minor differences in quality of work, you could expect their services to be close in price to each other. 

When it comes to choosing where you do your grocery shopping, there are several stores you can choose from that offer identical and/ or similar products with competitive prices. Public grocery stores offer incentives like buy one get one and also have generic products sold much cheaper than the name brands. Club stores are structured a little differently than their public counterparts but they are both OLIGOPOLISTIC.

Club stores usually carry their own line of products as well as some certain name brands and use no compete agreements which indicates COLLUSION with their competitors. The prices at the club are usually much cheaper than the public stores but you must buy in bulk. Quite often some items, if not whole isles are moved around to make you spend more time searching which increases the likelyhood of more products being purchase.

Typically there are items placed at the end of an isle, or a bump out to spotlight a product which is being promoted at a discounted price. An item that was displayed at the end of an isle three weeks ago could be replaced by another one, same brand, but the previous item might be found half way down the isle. 

Product packaging has an impact on buying. Generic brand products are proprietary to the store that is selling the product and are usually white packages with colored writing only, and are always a cheaper alternative to brand names without quality sacrifice. Brand names rely on the familiarity of their label design and when loyalty to a brand is established, a consumer will usually tolerate a price increase. 

The industry giants such as car manufacturers, phone companies, large grocery chains, including the big brand names that they sell, to name a few, are in the category of oligopolies. MONOPOLIES include such entities as water and electricity providers. This is where your freedom of choice ends, as these are neccessity products for everyone. In contrast to the competitive market where they cannot effect market prices, a monpolistic advantage is that the price is in their control as they are the market with no competition.