Role of Entrepreneurs and Innovators

       Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneur is an innovator, initiator and a risk bearer- an element that combines labor, land and capital resources in new and original way so that this business may produce new goods and services. In past a single individual carried out all entrepreneur functions in a firm, but nowadays because of more technological complex economy, entrepreneurship is more likely to be carried out by entrepreneurial teams. Such teams may include two or three people working as their own bosses or developing new ideas, or this team may also consist of a larger number of entrepreneurs who are administrated their own financial resources.
   Other innovators In the process of producing are included other people who don’t bear personal financial risk. They may be scientists, key executives, or other employees engaged in Research and Development activities (R&D). (They are sometimes called intrapreneurs)
Start-Ups
   Sometimes entrepreneurs form some small companies called start-ups, these firms focus of developing and introducing new products or on creating a new production or distribution technique. An example from history, was when two people working in their garages, formed such a start-up in 1970s. After some time they have founded their own company: Apple Computers.
Innovating existing firms
   Innovators also work in already existing corporations, whether these are large or small. In this case innovators are salaried workers which are paid very well and get substantial bonuses and shares of the profit. R&D work in large corporations has produced very important technological advances in different production systems.
    However, some large firms have split their R&D and manufacturing part of firm and have formed new, more innovative firms.
Anticipating Future
   It’s extremely difficult to anticipate the future but that’s what innovators are trying to do. These people who have strong anticipation abilities and are highly-determined may be able to introduce new and improved products at the right time. If they do so, the rewards may very big, monetary and nonmonetary ones. In order to develop a product one should be very creative and rewards for his success may be some intangible rewards like personal satisfaction. Winners of this competition of innovations can reap huge monetary rewards in for of economic profits, stock appreciation and very big bonuses. An example can be Paul Allen and Bill Gates who founded Microsoft in 1970s and received by 2000 approximately 60 billion of dollars.
   Past success offer innovators and entrepreneurs access to further innovations that may anticipate buyers’ wants. Even if they may not succeed the second time, a try is also important. Market doesn’t care if the entrepreneurs and innovators are Canadian, Americans, Japanese, Chinese or Swiss. Main scope is innovation and better society.
Government and University Scientific Research
   Very small amount of money from R&D is spent on scientific research, because scientific principles can’t be patented and they don’t have immediate commercial uses. However, scientific knowledge is very important for technological advance. That’s why entrepreneurs try to find out the output of universities and government labs’ researches.
   Government and university labs have been the place where a lot of amazing technological inventions have been discovered. Computers and biotechnology are some results of experiments made there. That’s why firms tend to invest in university researches that are related to their products. Business founding of R&D at university has grow rapidly. Today scientists and universities understand that their work may have some commercial value, that’s why they are teaming up with innovators and share possible profits. However, some firms find it more profitable to make researches on their own. This is more common in pharmaceutical and computer industry where it’s uncommon to distribute new scientific knowledge generated in their labs.

Price leadership Model

     This model is a very interesting one. It explains some phenomena that are happening in oligopolistic type markets. So what does it means? Price leadership is an implicit (invisible) agreement among oligopolists by which they can coordinate prices without involving in price collusion based on secret meeting or formal agreements. This kind of method requires the “dominant firm”  (largest or most efficient one) to initiate price changes, so that all other firms more or less will try to follow this leader.  In many industries cement, fertilizers, cigarettes, cars and diverse machineries industries practiced this price leadership.
Tactics
   Price leadership in industries suggests that the price leader may use some of the following tactics:

  Price changes (infrequent)
   Since the price change may create the risk that the rivals won’t follow it, price regulations should be made only infrequently. Price leader shouldn’t respond to daily small increases in costs and demand.  Price should be modified just in the case when costs and demand have changed greatly, for example the price of row materials or wages of workers increased rapidly, or government excised higher taxes.
Communications
   Price leader sometimes communicates higher costs other oligopolistic firms by means of speeches of major executives or press. By publicizing the need to raise the price, price leader seeks other rivals to inform and to agree about price modifications.

Limit Pricing
   Price leader may not always choose the price that maximizes the profits in short-run for the industry, because it wants to block the entry to this industry of new firms. If economies of scale of existing firms are the major barrier, then new firms can pass this obstacle if the existing firms, including price leader, set a high-price for the goods and services they produce. So, new small firms may survive only if the industry sets a very high price. To block the entry of new firms to this oligopolistic market system, this price leader may keep the price bellow short-run maximizing level. This strategy of blocking entry from the new firms is called limit pricing.
Price wars
   Sometime price leadership in oligopolistic market system may end up at least temporarily or may result in price wars.  Most price wars sometimes run their course. When the firms realize that low prices are reducing their revenues dramatically, they may “offer” price leadership to other industry’ leading firms. That firms starts to rise prices and other businesses are willing to follow.

Obstacles to collusion

     Cartels (that are a formal agreement among various firms in industry to set the prices of products and establish the outputs of the individual firms or to divide the market among them) and other arrangements are difficult to create and to maintain. Let’s describe some barriers to collusion for various industries:
Demand and Cost differences
   Oligopolists face different cost of production and demand curves, so it’s difficult for them to agree on price, which is true for industries that produce differentiated products and change them frequently. Even if firms have standardized products, they usually have different market shares and operate at different degrees of productive efficiency. That’s why even homogeneous oligopolistic firms may have different demand and cost curves.
   Differences in demand and cost mean that even profit-maximizing price and output will be different among firms; there will be no single price acceptable by all firms. Price collusion depends on concessions and compromises which are not easily to obtain, since there are many obstacles to collusion.
     Number of Businesses
       So, it’s obvious the fact that more firms being present in an industry, harder is to create a cartel or other kind of price collusion. An agreement on price set is relatively hard to accomplish when there are 3 or 4 firms, but what if there are 10 firms that share each about 10% of the market, or there is Big Four that has about 70 percent of market share, and there are 4-5 small firms that have other 30% of this market share.
Cheating
     As it was explained in Game Theory model (previous article), there is a high-temptation for collusive oligopolistic firm to make a secret cut in price that may result in increased revenues. So buyers that are getting price cut by one supplier may wait for price-cut for another. Buyers may attempt to create a play between these two firms, so that it may transform into a real war. Even if cheating between collusive oligopolists may be profitable, this act is destructing it over time. However, collusion is more likely to succeed when cheating is easier to observe and punish.
Possible Entry
   Greater revenues may result in attracting new firms in this industry. Since this may create increased market supply and reduced prices, successful collusion of oligopolists requires them to block the entry for new producers.
Recession
   Recessions serves as enemies to collusion, since markets will increase average total costs (ATC), because oligopolists’ demand and marginal revenues (MR) will decrease in response to this recession. Firms will find out that the quantity supplied by them is in excess, so these firms will have to avoid great profit reductions (or losses) after cutting prices and thus they will gain sale at expense of rivals.
Anti-combined law (legal barrier)
   Many countries have anti-combined laws that prohibit this price-fixing collusion, so this means that they have a system of price control.

Oligopoly Pricing: A Game Theory Overview

   Oligopoly pricing behavior has characteristics of a specific game of strategy. Like chess or poker. The best way to play such a game depends on the way opponent play. Oligopolists (in our case players) must pattern their action according to actions and reactions of rivals. The study of oligopolists behave in this strategic situations is called game theory. We will use game theory model to analyze and explain the pricing behavior of oligopolists. Let’s assume that in our oligopolistic market system are only two firms that produce CDs simply called “A” and “B”. Each firms- “A” and “B”- has a choice of two pricing strategies: increase the price or lower it. The profit of each firm depends on what strategy it chooses and what strategy its rival chooses.
   There are four combinations of strategies possible for these two firms, and letter cells in the table below express them. For example, cell W represents low-price strategy of firm “B” and high-price strategy of firm “A”. This table is called payoff matrix because its cells represent the profit(payoff) each firm makes that result from combination of strategies of firms “A” and “B”. Cell W represents that after firm “A” chooses to adopt high-price strategy and firm “B” chooses to adopt low-price strategy, then firm “B” will make 4 million dollars and firm “A” will make only 1 million.

Mutual Interdependence
   The Data in the payoff matrix are just hypothetical one, but relationship is very realistic. Remind the fact that oligopolistic firms can increase their revenues, and influence rival’s profits, by changing its price strategies. Each firm’s payoff depends on its own pricing policy and that of its rival. This mutual interdependence in economics is very well demonstrated by figure above. If both firm “A” and firm “B” adopt a high-price strategy then revenue of each one will be 3 million of dollars. If firm “A” uses a low-price strategy while firm “B” uses a high-price strategy then firm “A” will increase its market share and profit from 3 to 4 million of dollars, however firm “B” will lose 1 million of dollars, since its revenues will decrease from 2 million to 1 million of dollars. So, firm “B” high-price policy will be efficient only if firm “A” will also choose to employ a high-price strategy.
Collusive Tendency
   The figure above suggests that oligopolists will benefit from collusion, or better said cooperation with rivals. An example of benefit can be when both firms are following high-price strategies, so each firm will get a profit of 3 million of dollars (cell X).
   Note that either firm “A” or firm “B” can increase its profit by switching from high-price to lo-price policy. So, the profit can become 4 million of dollars, but the firm that keeps high-price policy will get only 1 million of dollars as revenue. If the firm that right now employs high-price strategy switches to low-price strategy will increase its revenues by 1 million so it will be able to collect 2 million (cell Z). The effect of all this will be switching the profits from 3 million (cell X) to ones which worth 2 million (cell Z).
   In real situation, however independent actions of oligopolists may lead to competitive low-price strategies, which clearly will be beneficial to consumers but not also to oligopolists whose profits will decrease.
   How can oligopolists avoid low-profit outcome of cell Z? They may collude, rather that installing independent and competitive price. Each firm will increase its profits from 2 to 3 million dollars (from cell Z to cell X).
Cheating
   The payoff matrix explains why oligoplists may be tempted to cheat on a collusive agreement. Suppose that our firms “A” and “B” agree to maintain high-price policy, both of them earning 3 million of dollars (cell X). Both firms are tempted to cheat so that they will be able to increase their revenues to 4 million of dollars. If firm “A” cheats and diminishes its prices then it will increase its revenues from 3 to 4 million of dollars (cell Y), while if firm “B” cheats secretly and moves to low-price policy while firm “A” keeps high-price policy then firm “B” will increase its revenues by 1 million of dollars moving from cell X to cell W.

Technological advance: invention, innovation, and diffusion.

       In economics technological advantage is new and better goods and services and new and better ways of producing or spreading them. This process occurs over a theoretical time called very long run, than can be as short as few weeks or as long as many years. Let’s recall that in all our market systems (pure competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and pure monopoly), the short run is a period in which technology, plant are fixed, however in the long run , technology is constant but the firms can change their plant size and are free to enter and exit the industry. In contrast, very long run is a period in which technology can change and firm can develop and supply totally new products.
   It’s known that technological advantage shifts product possibility curve upward, enabling economy to achieve more goods and more services. Technological advantage can be is made up of three parts: invention, innovation, and diffusion.
 Invention
   The first step to technological advantage is invention: the discovery of product or process of producing by using imagination, thinking and experimenting. Invention is a process and the result of it is also called invention. Invention is based in scientific knowledge and it is the result of work of individuals who work on their own or as members of Research and Development (R&D) departments in firms. Government encourages invention by providing patents, right to sell any innovative process of production, machines or products in a set time.
Innovation
Innovation is directly related to invention. While invention is “discovery and proof of workability”, innovation is the successful introduction of new product (invention) in the market, the first use of a new method of producing, or the creation of new form of business firm. There are two types of innovation: product innovation, improving products and services, and process innovation, which is improved ways of production and spreading of these inventions in the market.
In contrast to invention, innovations cannot be patented. Innovation needs not to weaken or destroy the existing firms. Because new products and processes threaten firms’ survival, existing firms have a high incentive to engage into research and development (R&D) process continuously. These innovative products and processes enable firm to earn higher revenue or to maintain the present ones. Innovation can strengthen or weaken market power.
 Diffusion
   Diffusion is the process of spreading of inventions through imitating or copying. To take the advantage of new profits or to slow down disappearing of others, all firms try to implement the innovations. In most of the cases innovation leads to widespread imitation (that’s diffusion) of inventions. For example, soon after McDonald’s introduced the fast-food hamburger, Burger Kings also started to produce it, since it offered high revenues for the firms that supplied this good.
Research and Development (R&D) Expenditures
When it’s related to business research and development means the efforts towards inventions, innovations and diffusion. Many countries engage in R&D of national defense, so that annually they spend thousands of billions of dollars.
Importance of Technological Advantage
   Technological advances for many centuries were viewed ad external to economies, like a force to which economies adjust. Periodically new advances in scientific and technological knowledge occurred. Firms and industries, incorporated new technology into their products and production process to increase or to maintain their revenues. After making some adjustments, they continue to settle into long-run equilibrium position. Economists believe that technological advantage is related to advance of science, which is very important for market system. Some of economists see capitalism is the as driving force of technological advantage. Technological advantage arises from rivalry among individuals and firms that motivates them to seek and exploit new opportunities of profit and of expanding. This rivalry occurs between new firms and existing ones. Entrepreneurs and innovators are viewed as heart of technological advantage.

Measurement of Industry Concentration

      There are several methods used to measure the degree to which oligopolistic industries are concentrated by largest firms. The most often used ways to measure are concentration ratios and the Herfindahl index.

Concentration Ratio
   Concentration Ration shoes the percentage of total output produced and sold by industry’s largest firms. For example, three largest U.S producers of iron, supply almost 100% of all iron resource in this country.
   When the largest three-four firms in an industry control 40% or more of the market, that industry is said to be oligopolistic. Although concentration ratios offer useful ideas about competitiveness and monopoly power of diverse industries, there are three shortcomings.

• Local Markets

   Concentration ratios relate to nations as a whole, where the markets for some goods are highly localized because of expensive transport. For example, the four-firm concentration ratio for tobacco products is just 37% in China, suggesting that this industry is a competitive one. But, when we relate this product to some specific market or town in this country, we may often find that four firms produce about 80% of the total output in that area.

• Inter-industry Competition

   Inter-industry competition is competition between the products of one industry and the products of another industry. An example to this kind of competition may serve primary metals in some industries aluminum and copper, since aluminum competes with copper in many applications. (Electric devices, robots, machineries)

• World Trade

   The data for products produced in one country only may overstate concentration ratio since in most of cases they don’t account for import competition of foreign suppliers. Although some figures show that domestic firms produce over 90% of the total output for some good, they ignore the fact that some large quantities of that good may be imported. Many of the world’s largest corporations are foreign, so many of them are spread in diverse countries.

Herfindahl Index
   The shortcomings of concentration ratio from above apply to many measures of concentration, but one of these can be eliminated: Let’s say in industry “A” one firm produces all market output, but in industry “B” five firms produce 20% of the market. The concentration ratio is 100% in both cases. But industry “A” is pure monopoly, while industry “B” is an oligopoly. Economically, monopoly power is greater in industry “A” is greater than that from industry “B”, this fact isn’t shown by identical 100% concentration ratio.
   Herfindahl index solves this problem. This index is the sum of the squared percentage market shares all firms in the industry have. In equation from:

   Where %S₁ is the percentage share of firm 1, %S₂ is the percentage share of firm 2, and so on for each firm in the industry. By squaring percentages this index give more power to firms that have larger market shares, than to smaller ones. In case that a single firm has 100% then the Herfindahl index gives its highest value- 10000. In our industry “B”, Herfinahl index will be 20²+20²+20²+20²+20² which results in 2000, which is much more less that 10000 showing less market power.(In a purely competitive industry this index will approach to zero). More market power-higher Herfindahl index.

Oligopoly Market System

   Oligopoly is a market system that is dominated by few big suppliers of homogeneous or differentiated products. Because there are few firms, oligopolists have great control over prices, but they should consider reaction of rivals after they change price of goods, output quantity and amount of money spent on advertising.
Producers
   The phrase “few large producers” is one necessary to describe this kind of market system. Some examples of oligopoly can be two or three zinc producers in Sweden, or five or six producers of auto parts in U.K. When you will read in some magazines at economics about Big Three, Big Four or Big Five, you may be sure that there is described an oligopoly.
 Homogeneous or Differentiated Products
   An oligopoly may be either homogeneous or differentiated one, since the firms in this kind of market system produce a standardized or differentiated product. Many industrial goods( aluminum, lead, cement) are standardized products that are supplied in oligopolies. However, other goods (like cigarettes, automobiles, breakfast cereals) are produced in differentiated oligopolies. Last kind of oligopoly engages in non-price competition by heavy advertising.
   Price and mutual interdependence
   Since in oligopolies there are few firms, each one is a price-maker, like monopolists the y may set the price and output level for their goods, so that these firms control the revenue. However, unlike monopolists (since there are no competitors), oligopolists should consider the reaction of rivals to this changes in price, output, product’s characteristics and money spent on advertising. Thus Oligopolists are described by mutual interdependence: a situation in which firm’s profits doesn’t depend completely on its price and sales policy, but also on that of rivals. For example, before increasing the price of its drinks Pepsi should predict the response of other major producers, like Coca-Cola.
   Entry-Barriers
   Similar entry barriers created in pure monopoly are also created in oligopoly. Economies of scale are a factor that serves as barrier to entry in some oligopolistic industries, such as aircraft, car-producing, and cement industries. In this kind of industries three or four firms control the market supply, so that they have enough money to produce economies of scale, but other firms even if they will want to enter this market will have a small market share so that they won’t be able to have enough revenues to produce economies of scale. They would be high-cost producers, so that these firms won’t be able to survive in this industry.
   Ownership and control of raw materials are another explanation why it’s very difficult to enter in oligopolistic market system. Oligopolists also prevent the entry of new competitors by preemptive pricing and advertising strategies.
Mergers
   Some oligopolies have started because of very fast growth of dominant firms in some industries. But other however, produced an oligopoly by merging with other competing firms. Merging or combination of two or more firms may increase their revenues and economies of scale, because of increased market share they got.
   Another explanation of “urge to merge” is the want for a higher monopolistic power, since larger firm has a greater control over market supply and on the price of its product. Also, because of higher economies of scale they get less costs on producing some goods and services than their rivals.
Is merge between Google and Facebook possible and also profitable?