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Market Structure and the Role of Government

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Market Structure and the Role of Government

Sue P. Gombio

HCA-530 Healthcare Policies and Economics

1. Explain the unique characteristics of the four primary market structures.
The interrelated aspects of a market, such as the amount and comparative strength of consumers and sellers and degree of involvement between them, level and methods of competition, degree of product differentiation, and the simplicity of access into and exit from the market. There are four basic types of market structure and these are the 1) Perfect Competition: this structure is rare in the real world; mainly buyers and sellers without any influence on prices, examples of a perfect competition are agricultural industries in which products are similar to its competitors, 2) Oligopoly, a couple of sellers who has influence or control over the prices, example is the gasoline industry because it dominates the market and the large firms have the autonomy over it, 3) Pure Monopoly, where a single seller or firm has complete or total control with the supplies and pricing, an example for this are the public utilities like natural gas companies, 4) Monopolistic Competition, is a market situation with a significant number of sellers who offers similar but not identical products, an example of this is the fast food restaurants, where most of them offer hamburgers but with different ingredients or different ways of cooking it. 2. Explain why economic profits are zero in the long run in a monopolistically competitive market.
Monopolistic competition is a structure in the market categorized by a huge amount of small businesses producing similar products but not identical products with good supply flexibility and broad knowledge (Amos, 2015). This means that each one of these businesses has some sort of control in the market and face a negatively sloped demand curve, therefore, an

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