Finally, monopoly and perfect competition are compared. Units 7 and 8 will be made available week 5. Other Market Structures Unit 9 describes the final market types - monopolistic competition and oligopoly. The former describes a market similar to perfect competition, the difference being that in monopolistic competition the firms produce differentiated products. The unit describes the economic model of how firms in this kind of market make their choices and compares this market with perfect competition and monopoly.
Oligopoly is big business - markets that contain only a small number of relatively large firms.
The unit will also describe the public policies that has been put into place to try to reduce the power of big business - in particular, antitrust laws. All of these questions, and more, are addressed in unit 10. Units 9 and 10 will be made available week 6. This unit serves as a bridge in two ways. First, in providing a way to describe how households and firms interact with each other, it will be used to distinguish between those product markets already discussed and the resource markets which will be described in unit 12.