Michael Weiss is a columnist for Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, and NOW Lebanon. He is also a fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia where he is the editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, an online news and translation journal covering Russian foreign policy and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Perfectly competitive firms are small in size in relation to the market size â and none of these firms control the market. A monopolist firm, on the other hand, is larger and controls the entire market for its industry. Monopolistic firms are price makers by virtue of their market control.
Monopolistic competition implies that there are enough firms in the industry that one firm's decision does not set off a chain reaction. In an oligopoly, a price cut by one firm can set off a price war, but this is not the case for monopolistic competition.