Market Structures
-level economics introduced me to different types of market structures. I studied perfect competition, where many small firms sell identical products, and monopolies, where one company dominates the market. In perfect competition, no single company has control over prices, and consumers have a lot of choices. In contrast, a monopoly has much more power to set prices since there are no competitors.
Between these extremes, there are also oligopolies, where a few large firms dominate the market, and monopolistic competition, where many companies sell similar but not identical products. Understanding these different market structures helped me see how real-world markets function differently depending on the number of competitors and the type of products they sell.