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.
A central feature of monopolistic competition is that products are differentiated. There are four main types of differentiation: Physical product differentiation, where firms use size, design, colour, shape, performance, and features to make their products different.