Figure 9.1 Political Power From a Cotton Monopoly In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States, specifically the Southern states, had a near monopoly in the cotton supplied to Great Britain. These states attempted to leverage this economic power into political power, trying to sway Great Britain to formally recognize the Confederate States of America. (modification of work by “ashleylovespizza”/Flickr Creative Commons)

There is a widespread belief that top executives at firms are the strongest supporters of market competition, but this belief is far from the truth. Think about it this way: If you very much wanted to win an Olympic gold medal, would you rather have few or no other athletes in the competition or face many athletes that are just as good as you? Similarly, if you would like to attain a very high level of profits, would you rather manage a business with little or no competition, or struggle against many tough competitors who are trying to sell to your customers? By now, you might have read the chapter on Perfect Competition. In this chapter, we explore the opposite extreme—monopoly.

If perfect competition is a market where firms have no market power and they simply respond to the market price, monopoly is a market with no competition at all, where firms have complete market power. In the case of monopoly, one firm produces all of the output in a market. Since a monopoly faces no significant competition, it can charge any price it wishes. While a monopoly by definition refers to a single firm, in practice, the term is often used to describe a market in which one firm merely has a very high market share. This tends to be the definition that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) uses.

Even though there are very few true monopolies in existence, we do deal with some of those few every day, often without realizing it. For example, the U.S. Postal Service has a monopoly over first-class mail. In some communities, there may be only one provider of electricity and only one garbage collection company. Some new drugs are produced by only one pharmaceutical firm, and no close substitutes for that drug may exist.

From the mid-1990s until 2004, the DOJ prosecuted the Microsoft Corporation for including Internet Explorer as the default web browser with its operating system. The DOJ’s argument was that since Microsoft possessed an extremely high market share in the industry for operating systems, the inclusion of a free web browser constituted unfair competition to other browsers, such as Netscape Navigator. Since nearly everyone was using Windows, including Internet Explorer eliminated the incentive for consumers to explore other browsers and made it impossible for competitors to gain a foothold in the market. For similar reasons, multiple countries, including Canada, South Korea, and the European Union, have sued Google. In June 2017, the European Union ruled that Google had engaged in anti-competitive behavior, and fined Google $2.72 billion.

This chapter begins by describing how monopolies are protected from competition, including laws that prohibit competition, technological advantages, and certain configurations of demand and supply. It then discusses how a monopoly will choose its profit-maximizing quantity to produce and what price to charge. While a monopoly must be concerned about whether consumers will purchase its products or spend their money on something altogether different, the monopolist need not worry about the actions of other competing firms producing its products. As a result, a monopoly is not a price taker like a perfectly competitive firm, but instead exercises some power to choose its market price.