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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.

We develop, estimate, and test a tractable general equilibrium model of oligopsony with differentiated jobs and concentrated labor markets. We estimate key model parameters by matching new evidence on the relationship between firms' local labor market share and their employment and wage responses to state corporate tax changes. The model quantitatively replicates quasi-experimental evidence on imperfect productivity-wage pass-through and strategic wage setting of dominant employers. Relative to the efficient allocation, welfare losses from labor market power are 7.6 percent, while output is 20.9 percent lower. Lastly, declining local concentration added 4 percentage points to labor's share of income between 1977 and 2013. (JEL E25, H71, J24, J31, J42, R23)

The Philippine electricity market is in a period of transition as the restructuring provisions of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) of 2001 are being implemented. Under current structure, the market is highly concentrated, indicating the existence of market power. In addition, many plants, including small ones, become pivotal suppliers during peak hours, creating opportunities for the exercise of market power. Concentration in the spot market is even more pronounced as a large percentage of uncontracted capacity belongs to the Independent Power Producers (IPP) with NPC contracts whose energy outputs are under the control of a single company, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corporation. This highlights the urgency of speeding up the dominance mitigating provision of EPIRA, namely, the appointment of independent IPP administrators who will trade the IPP outputs in the wholesale market.