The market structure of perfect competition has a lot of ideal
qualities–hence the name perfect. For example, perfectly
competitive firms are productively efficient, and perfectly
competitive markets are allocatively efficient. It is, however,
difficult to find many examples of perfectly competition in the
real world. Perfect competition is really a benchmark against which
we compare other market structures in the real world.
How much actual competition occurs in perfectly competitive
markets? Some make the claim that there is actually no...