Talk:Strategy for Information Markets/Monopoly

Audit of article
Made a few edits
 * Wasn't sure why there were two sections ("Pricing complements generally" and "Prices of zero, or negative"), so I deleted these.
 * Made some formatting fixes.
 * Why no mention of 3rd degree price discrimination, or market segmentation, in the Price discrimination section?
 * Some words (such as Marginal Cost) were arbitrarily capitalized, while other words that should have been capitalized weren't (windows 7, etc).
 * There should not be spaces between a parenthesis symbol and the text inside it, like "( Bell Telephone)".
 * Be careful when you mention that consumers do not benefit from price discrimination. In some instances groups of consumers are better off than they would have been with a uniform price. I wouldn't say it "only" benefits the seller, although it probably does most of the time.
 * Cosmopolite (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Knowledge Advantage
In that section if mentions 3 major causes for the thwart monopoly formation. Patents, Intellectual property law may serve to strategically prevent (if not issued or respected) or enable monopolistic practices, mostly it enables since a patent provides the right to exclude others. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 23:56, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

TDang review April 2012
I'm reviewing this version. I'll likely be more critical than complimentary, because (a) that's the way I am and (b) that's what will help improve things. Please don't take the criticism-over-compliments to mean I have a wholly negative view.

Make sure to check the all-purpose review thoughts as well.

TDang (discuss • contribs) 03:29, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
 * "a business has the market power to set any price it wants for a certain product"--This is an overly strong statement. A monopolist is not a price-taker, but it doesn't have the ability to set "any price it wants", at least not if it wants to sell anything.
 * Natural monopoly--The formalities and graph are very good, and should definitely stay, but a little more story to go with them would be good. Just a little, and as long as this is a book on information economics, making the story about some kind of information good would make sense.
 * Government monopolies--There are other kinds of monopolies which are government granted monopolies, where the government gives a person or organization monopoly rights, but the government itself does not hold the monopoly. For the purposes of this book, these government-granted monopolies are probably more important than the other kind of government monopoly. For instance, intellectual property (including both patents and copyrights) is a government-granted monopoly (for our purposes, we should ignore trademarks, though).
 * Knowledge advantage--This section doesn't talk about what it's header says it will talk about!
 * Mergers and acquisitions--This is probably tangential to the focus of this textbook. Unless it can be made more directly applicable, it's a distraction which should be cut out.
 * Monopoly pricing--This section should be much more developed. In fact, it probably should be the main part of the page.
 * MR = MC--Remember that this is true of monopolists, but also of firms in competitive markets, so that doesn't help unless it's elaborated on. What's different than in a competitive market?
 * Graphics would help tremendously for all this.
 * Definitely this should include the calculus and formal analysis of a monopolist maximizing profit.
 * What about elasticity conditions for maximizing monopoly profit?
 * While it's interesting to think about various marginal-cost shapes in general, for the focus of this text, it might be worthwhile to stick to constant marginal cost.
 * Price discrimination--This is interesting, but doesn't quite fit into this page, since this page is "background". I've moved price discrimination to its own page where it needs cleanup.
 * Penetration pricing and Pricing both sides of two-sided platform--I have not moved these, but ideally they should be moved, I'm just not positive where to. Possibly the best thing to do is develop them further here and move them later. If so, they need to be developed with a great deal more detail. We have not covered the detail for pricing both sides of a two-sided platform (but if you'd like to do the research to fill it in, that's great). We have covered the detail for penetration pricing.
 * "after time passes and demand increases" remember there's a difference between demand increasing and quantity demanded increasing, and that holds here as well. This should be phrased in terms of what equilibrium the market is going to not "demand increases".
 * "the optimal level"--What does "optimal" mean?
 * "When a company does this, their competitors may fail because they cannot keep up the with low prices they are charging."--No, that's predatory pricing
 * "use the product and hopefully market it"--why is the company hoping the customers will market the product? I think this is mis-phrased.
 * "sure that the product or service is elastic enough"--elasticity isn't the best way to think about this.
 * The second paragraph (disadvatnages) of the penetration pricing section seems like speculation. All of that could be argued with unless it's referenced or more carefully analyzed.
 * The fourth and fifth paragraphs (on discount stores and hook-bait) don't really match what we mean when we talk about penetration pricing. They probably should come out.
 * The section on pricing for two-sided platforms is understandably sparse, since we haven't covered that much and it's not in your book. However, it's a little bit wrong right now. I'm not sure how to recommend making it right, except doing more research on it. Otherwise, it can be pulled out and wait for someone else (possibly me) to fill it in later.
 * References--Most of the three references currently in the article aren't good enough. "fundamentalfinance.com" and "digitaleconomist.org" both appear to be blogs (albeit sophisticated ones). About.com is not an adequate source, it should be treated like a blog or Wikipedia. The reference to ATT is worthwhile for it's limited use.TDang (discuss • contribs) 03:43, 29 April 2012 (UTC)