Competitive Strategies

Abstract

Competition permeates this book. Up to now, it has been mostly disguised because the corporate cases have been generally handled one company at a time and there were few comments about its competitors. This has been to simplify things, to focus on other topics. But by suppressing competition the picture so created is unrealistic. Although it is possible to conceive of companies operating without competition, having a monopoly, in practice such commercial situations are rare. Conversely, large companies do not operate at the other end of the scale either, under conditions of polypoly, where competitors are extremely numerous. The intermediate type, oligopoly, is the competitive form most relevant for a large business corporation. The basic feature of oligopoly is the small number of competitors, in fact so small that they can keep an eye on each other, react to each others’ measures, and find the practice worthwhile.