I don’t mean to be nitpicking, but a monopoly is a very specific thing. It’s quite different than it just being inconvenient to switch to a competitor. In very many cases in normal market competition, it’s inconvenient to switch to competitors (buying a new car or house, changing your insurance, and so on), but that doesn’t effect the quality of the product. Similarly, for a monopoly to effect the quality of OKCupid’s service, it would have to be a very specific situation, and different than what currently exists, which seems to be quite normal market functioning.
Unless OKCupid is hiring the government or people with guns to threaten other websites out of existence, there won’t be a drift towards a monopoly.
A monopoly isn’t created by one company getting the overwhelming majority of customers. A monopoly is only created when competitors cannot enter the market. It’s a subtle distinction but it’s very important, because what’s implied is that the company with the monopoly can jack up their prices and abuse customers. They can’t do this without feeding a garden of small competitors that can and will outgrow them (see Myspace, America Online, etc), unless those competitors are disallowed from ever existing.
You can keep downvoting this, but it’s a very important concept in economics and it will still be true.
It’s still more work to put a profiles on multiple sites.
Hi Eugine,
I don’t mean to be nitpicking, but a monopoly is a very specific thing. It’s quite different than it just being inconvenient to switch to a competitor. In very many cases in normal market competition, it’s inconvenient to switch to competitors (buying a new car or house, changing your insurance, and so on), but that doesn’t effect the quality of the product. Similarly, for a monopoly to effect the quality of OKCupid’s service, it would have to be a very specific situation, and different than what currently exists, which seems to be quite normal market functioning.
Coscott was talking about a “a natural drift towards a monopoly”.
Unless OKCupid is hiring the government or people with guns to threaten other websites out of existence, there won’t be a drift towards a monopoly.
A monopoly isn’t created by one company getting the overwhelming majority of customers. A monopoly is only created when competitors cannot enter the market. It’s a subtle distinction but it’s very important, because what’s implied is that the company with the monopoly can jack up their prices and abuse customers. They can’t do this without feeding a garden of small competitors that can and will outgrow them (see Myspace, America Online, etc), unless those competitors are disallowed from ever existing.
You can keep downvoting this, but it’s a very important concept in economics and it will still be true.