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Ebay and Business Structures

Good Essays

1,083
Rebecca Payne
ECO2023 Pray
11-19-2012

eBay & Weird Al
Business Structures

There are a variety of different business structures that comprise the market in the world today. The most common ones found in the business world today are sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations. From these you will also find monopolies and oligopolies. Economists assume there are a number of different buyers and sellers in the market which leads to competition which allows prices to change in response to changes in supply and demand.(1) In many industries you there are substitutes for products, so if one type of product becomes too expensive the consumer can choose an alternative product that is cheaper, or one of better quality. …show more content…

However, the goods and services sold on eBay can be considered perfectly competitive. There is a multitude of buyers, or producers, and consumers have options with substitutes. Most of the products sold within their category are similar and for the quality of the product, they are typically within the same price range of one another, and each individual seller chooses their price based on other similar goods sold on the site. Ebay, as a company itself, fits more in the category of an oligopoly, which is actually pretty common in any market. Other alternative websites include Yahoo!, Amazon, and Quibids, but there are only a small number of them, certainly not hundreds as in monopolistic competition. Also, eBay is interdependent on the few other auction website companies, competing with the fees they charge, as well as quality of customer support, and buyer/seller reliability. Another characteristic of eBay that coincides with it being considered an oligopoly is the fact that it has numerous entry barriers. It’s such a large company with many restrictions, and it would be hard for an up and coming substitute auction website to break into the market and compete with eBay or the other top companies in the industry. (6) Weird Al Yankovic, through his humor, gives a pretty accurate description of how eBay works. Though obviously made as a joke, it

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