Monopolistic Competition

Readers Question: if all firms in a monopolistic competitive industry were to merge would that firm produce as many differnt brands or just one brand?

Interesting question. I think it is an open ended question with many different possibilities. One approach is to think how firms in different industries may behave if they did merge. Bearing in mind the model of monopolistic competition doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny too well in the real world.

A monopolistic competitive industry has the following features:

• Many Firms
• Freedom of entry and exit
• Produce differentiated Products. Therefore firms have inelastic demand, they are price makers because the good is highly differentiated
• Make Normal Profits in the Long Run, but could make supernormal profits in the short term
• Are allocatively and productively inefficient.

Examples of monopolistic competition might include:

• Restaurants.
• Hair dressers

If the firms merged together there is no certainty how they would behave.

In some industries it makes sense to have many differentiated brands creating an illusion of competition and providing a barrier to entry.

How Many soap powders are there? about 35. But, most of these brands are owned by 2 companies, Unilever and Proctor and Gamble. Having brand proliferation means it is harder for a new firm to enter the market. This is because a new firm would have to compete against 30 established brands as opposed to 2. There is less chance of getting a good market share with so many brands. Therefore the new firm would have an incentive to keep different brands in order to deter competitors.

However, if you have merge different brands there may be economies of scale. You can devote more resources and investment to improving that particular product and maximising its efficiency. This might be appropriate for an industry like computer software or computers. There used to be many different brands of computers, until the pc came to dominate.

Are the different brands catering to different sectors of the market. If you take the restaurant business, there is a big difference between Chinese and Indian. If 2 restaurants merge, they would be better off retaining distinct business. It would make no sense to have  a restaurant which offered a mixture of Chinese/Indian - consumers would trust it less.

If you fear the arrival of a powerful company, it might be good to consolidate your brands. For example, there are many small search engines, but they would be better off combining forces to compete against the mighty Google.

•  Oligopoly
• UK Mergers