Market Structure

A monopsony is where there is a sole buyer of a product, but many sellers.

Perfect Competition is a type of market structure. In short, perfect competition is a market structure whereby there are many firms that sell a similar product.

A market that has Monopolistic structure can be seen as a mixture between a monopoly and perfect competition. Whilst monopoly and perfect competition are at completely different ends of the spectrum; monopolistic competition is somewhere in between.

Vertical integration is where two businesses at different stages of the supply chain join together.

When two businesses that are part of the same industry join together to form one company.

A natural monopoly occurs when there are high fixed costs meaning that it is unprofitable for more than one to be present in the market.

Oligopoly is derived from the Latin ‘olígoi’ – meaning “few”, and ‘pōléō’ – meaning “to sell”. So loosely translated, it means ‘few sellers’. This is a key characteristic of oligopolistic markets as it is defined by a few firms dominating the market.