[music] Welcome to Week 6 of my Microeconomics principles.
I am talking to you here from the Research Park at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign. I thought this was a good place to start
Week 6 when we talk about competition, because a Research Park is basically an
association the University has with many different companies in order to allow them
to operate at a low cost, by sharing some of their resources or inputs they need.
For instance, in this building we have right now, we have companies such as
Yahoo, John Deere, chemical companies like Dow Chemical, ADM Sierra Ventures Capital
Industry cinema industries, Dreamscape Cinema statistical in Strata, Caterpillar,
so, so I know many others that are kind of spread out in six or different, or seven
different buildings in this part of the campus.
And it's, it's, it's interesting and it's relevant because what these companies can
do by kind of being in this so-called incubators, is to share some of the
administrative costs secretary stuff, and in order to cut costs, and also they're
able to communicate better with each other, since they are so integrated,
right? A company like Yahoo might actually need
to coordinate their productions or, or services with a company like Strata that
provides you know, statistical services, and so forth.
So, what are we going to do this week? Well, first, we're going to talk a little
bit about market structure and the different type of market structure we can
talk about and how that influence the, the, the opportunity a company has for
pricing. And then, we focus our models, our
concepts on the market structure called perfect competition.
We basically said that the only way that companies can compete with each other is
by trying to cut cost and be the most effect, efficient that they can.
And when that situation occur, is where we have that idea of the survival of the
fittest in the business world. And where companies trying to make
themselves better off by trying to cut costs, and this is a good example of that,
of places like this. They actually drive technology down up,
and make products a lot cheaper for consumers.
So, we talked about at the end of the of the, of the week, about the long-run
competitive equilibrium model. So, we'll be back here at the end of the
week to kind of answer the question we established at the beginning of the week,
which is how computer power has gotten so, so good and so cheap, in so few, in so
little time. [music] Produced by OCE Atlas Digital
Media at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.