38 | Monopoly Power
A monopoly is a market in which there is only one seller. In a market served by one seller, a monopolist, the price may rise above competitive level.
AIDS has killed more than 36 million people worldwide. There are drugs available to treat AIDS, but the price of one pill is incredibly high in the U.S. — coming in at 25 times higher than its cost. Why is that?
In this video, we explore the costs and benefits of monopolies. We cover how monopolies and patents breed deadweight loss, market inefficiencies, and corruption.
Ever wonder why pharmaceuticals are so expensive? In this video, we show how low elasticity of demand results in monopoly markups
AIDS has killed more than 36 million people worldwide. There are drugs available to treat AIDS, but the price of one pill is incredibly high in the U.S. — coming in at 25 times higher than its cost. Why is that?
In this video, we explore the costs and benefits of monopolies. We cover how monopolies and patents breed deadweight loss, market inefficiencies, and corruption.
Ever wonder why pharmaceuticals are so expensive? In this video, we show how low elasticity of demand results in monopoly markups
As someone who researches inequities in health care, I’ve diligently followed the debate about healthcare reform.
However, most of my friends (and I suspect most Americans) wonder exactly what single payer healthcare is and how will it affect them.
Today on the show, we're launching a three part series on antitrust law, one of the most important but least-understood bodies of law in the United States.
For this first episode in the series, we're starting at the very beginning, in the nineteenth century, with the story of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. We go to Titusville, Pennsylvania, and retrace the steps of muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell as she uncovers the back room deals struck by Rockefeller, then one of the world's richest men. Tarbell's investigative reporting in the early 1900s inspired a court case that helped change the design of the American economy.
This is the second episode in our series on the history of competition, big business and antitrust law in America.
A little more than a hundred years ago, the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil company. It was a turning point in the balance of power between enormous companies and the free market. We told that story in the first episode of the series.
This is the third episode in our series on antitrust law in America. Our first episode told the story of Ida Tarbell and how her reporting on John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil changed antitrust law in the early 1900s. Our second episode followed the turn that took place in the 1970s in response to Robert Bork's Antitrust Paradox.
For this episode, we're looking at the present, and toward a future where markets may be dominated by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. A new wave of antitrust thinkers is asking if the size and reach of these companies is a threat to competition, and ultimately to consumers. It's the backlash to the backlash introduced by Robert Bork in the seventies, and a reassessment of the relationship between the government and business in the United States.
In this video, we show how the price system allows for people with dispersed knowledge and information about rose production to coordinate global economic activity.
What if there were no prices? How would you use available resources? To appreciate why market prices are essential to human well-being, consider what a fix we would be in without them.
In 1962, Gordon Segal — with his wife Carole — opened a scrappy Chicago shop called Crate & Barrel. That store turned into a housewares empire that has shaped the way Americans furnish their homes.
In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut.
Illegal dumping is the 'new narcotics' for organized criminals in the U.K.
Illegal dumping is the 'new narcotics' for organized criminals in the U.K.
“We have to take defending ourselves into our own hands,” one farmer said as moats and trenches are dug and reinforced gates installed.
This article by the Harvard Business Review examines recent changes in patent law.
In the last few decades, courts have both broadened the kinds of inventions for which patents can be granted and relaxed their oversight of what constitutes genuinely novel innovation. As a result, companies of all sizes are increasingly hindered in efforts to bring new products and services to market by patent holders claiming infringement of even trivial features.
Biosphere 2 was one of the most lauded experiments of the 1990s, then one of the most ridiculed. Now it is back, offering a unique way to put theories about climate and environment to the test.
This video examines the purpose and effect of patents in the United States of America.
Animal advocates accuse the Cayman Turtle Centre of mistreating its sea turtles and stoking demand for the meat of an endangered species, claims it denies.
At the Cayman Turtle Centre tourists can kiss, hug, and pass around young sea turtles. They can even take a swim with bigger ones if they want. It’s billed as a rare opportunity to come into contact with endangered green sea turtles, a migratory species whose numbers are on the decline because of egg poaching, habitat degradation, and entanglement with fishing nets.
This article explores how private property may have saved the pilgrims.
There are three configurations of property rights: state, communal, and private property. Within a family, many goods are in effect communally owned. But when the number of communal members exceeds normal family size, as happens in tribes and communes, serious and intractable problems arise. It becomes costly to police the activities of the members, all of whom are entitled to their share of the total product of the community, whether they work or not. This is the free-rider problem, and it is the most important institutional reason tribes and communes cannot rise above subsistence level (except in special circumstances, such as monasteries).
This week, Stan teaches you about patents. It turns out, they're patently complicated!
This week, Stan teaches you about patents. It turns out, they're patently complicated! So, patents have some similarity to copyright, in that they grant a limited monopoly to people who invent things. The key difference in patents and copyright is that patents are for THINGS. Copyright is for an idea. So, if you've come up with a great new invention, like for example, a condiment gun, you should get a patent. We'll also talk about some of the limitations and problems of patents, including patent trolls
The first few years of Plymouth colony were fraught with hardship and hunger. Economics had a lot to do with it.
Next year at this time, Americans will mark the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and the subsequent founding of the Plymouth colony by English Puritans we know as the Pilgrims. They, of course, became the mothers and fathers of the first Thanksgiving.