Vanishing Market Power

In: Estudos econômicos, Band 54, Heft 1, S. 135-166

Abstract

Abstract Perfect competition can be approximated in an environment with differentiated goods, heterogeneous firms, and frictions of trading. This paper considers an environment where sellers sell differentiated goods to buyers, and frictions of trading are represented by the buyers having incomplete consideration sets of the sellers in the market. Besides selling differentiated products, some sellers are more "prominent" and so are present in a larger number of buyers' consideration sets. However, despite these imperfections, as the average number of sellers in the buyers' consideration sets expands, the sellers' market power vanishes and the equilibrium of the market approximates competitive conditions.