Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 49, market structure.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, I'm going to talk about the different types of, well, market structure.

That is, the way markets are arranged in terms of the firms that exist and how they compete with each other,

and basically take a comparative analysis of the efficiency of these different market

structures and how consumer welfare is affected. The four main types of market structure that I'll

be analyzing are perfect competition where you have lots of buyers and sellers, monopoly when you

only have one seller, oligopoly when there are a few sellers and monopolistic competition where

you have a large or small number of sellers,

but they sell differentiated products.

Recommended pre-listening for this episode?

Mostly just listen to episode 48 on Theory of the Firm, the previous episode, because this episode

carries on fairly closely from that one.

Also, episode 12 on the price system, episode 16, profits and competition, and episode

5 on corporate conspiracies will also be relevant. Oh, episode 36 on consumer choice theory

is somewhat relevant as well, although that's less important. All right, let's get straight into it.

Market structure, first of all, we'll start with looking at perfect competition. But before I get into that, I should say that this episode continues on from the previous

episode on Theory of the Firm, in that if you remember in the previous episode, I talked about

how the optimal level of output that the firm selects in order to maximize profits, that optimal

level will depend upon how many other firms exist in the

...