Illustration of Imperfect Competition

Abstract

In Sect. 6.4, imperfect competition has already been considered in the land/housing market, in a hierarchical scheme, involving landowners, land developers and housing developers. Although such markets, as well as those in the retailing sector, represent situations where imperfect competition is prevalent, many production sectors also exhibit imperfect competition. This chapter addresses imperfect competition in goods production sectors. The first step is the development of demand and supply functions for perfectly competitive markets. Upon this basis, different scenarios for introducing imperfect competition are then introduced, distinguishing between oligopolistic and monopolistic competition as already defined and discussed in Chap. 2. All the developments are classified under the general heading of dispersed spatial price equilibrium, a probabilistic enhancement of spatial price equilibrium, described in Sect. 3.1.2.