Title: 
Headings: 

Content: How consumers view a particular product or service influences the market power and behavior of a business or producer. In the next few sections we will discuss four different market structures and their behavior. You can think of businesses being on a continuum with one extreme being perfect competition to the other extreme being monopolies. While few businesses are actually at either extreme, it is useful to look at the two extremes for comparison purposes. In between the two extremes are most businesses, which fall into the categories of monopolist competition and oligopolies. When examining the structure of a market, we focus on the differentiating characteristics: number of firms, type of product, ease of entry, and market power or price control. Perfect or Pure Competition
In the perfect or pure competition market, there are a large number of firms each producing the same product (as called a standardized or homogeneous product). Since the number of firms is very large, no one firm can influence the market price, thus each firm has no market power and each is a price taker. We also assume that there is perfect information, meaning everyone knows what price is being charged in all markets.