In theories of competition in economics, a barrier to entry, or an economic barrier to entry, is a fixed cost that must be incurred by a new entrant, regardless of production or sales activities, into a market that incumbents do not have or have not had to incur.
Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy. Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies, or give companies market power.
Barriers of entry also have an importance in industries. First of all it is important to identify that some exist naturally, such as brand loyalty.
Governments can also create barriers to entry to meet consumer protection laws, protecting the public. In other cases it can also be due to inherent scarcity of public resources needed to enter a market.
Various conflicting definitions of "barrier to entry" have been put forth since the 1950s. This has caused there to be no clear consensus on which definition should be used.
McAfee, Mialon, and Williams list seven common definitions in economic literature in chronological order including:
In 1956, Joe S. Bain used the definition "an advantage of established sellers in an industry over potential entrant sellers, which is reflected in the extent to which established sellers can persistently raise their prices above competitive levels without attracting new firms to enter the industry." McAfee et al. criticized this as being tautological by putting the "consequences of the definition into the definition itself."
In 1968, George Stigler defined an entry barrier as "A cost of producing that must be borne by a firm which seeks to enter an industry but is not borne by firms already in the industry." McAfee et al. criticized the phrase "is not borne" as being confusing and incomplete by implying that only current costs need be considered.
In 1979, Franklin M. Fisher gave the definition "anything that prevents entry when entry is socially beneficial.
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In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service by manipulating either the supply or demand of the product or service to increase economic profit. To make it simple, companies with strong market power can decide whether higher the price above competition levels or lower their quality produced but no need to worry about losing any customers, the strong market power for a company prevents they are involving competition.
A price war is a form of market competition in which companies within an industry engage in aggressive pricing strategies, “characterized by the repeated cutting of prices below those of competitors”. This leads to a vicious cycle, where each competitor attempts to match or undercut the price of the other. Competitors are driven to follow the initial price-cut due to the downward pricing pressure, referred to as “price-cutting momentum”. Heil and Helsen (2001) proposed that a price war exists only if one or more of a set of qualitative conditions are satisfied.
In economics, profit is the difference between revenue that an economic entity has received from its outputs and total costs of its inputs. It is equal to total revenue minus total cost, including both explicit and implicit costs. It is different from accounting profit, which only relates to the explicit costs that appear on a firm's financial statements. An accountant measures the firm's accounting profit as the firm's total revenue minus only the firm's explicit costs.
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