Price Point - Oligopoly Pricing

Oligopoly Pricing

In relation to customary price points, oligopolies can also generate price points. Such price points do not necessarily result from collusion, but as an emergent property of oligopolies: when all firms sell at the same price, any firm which attempts to raise its selling price will experience a decrease in sales and revenues (preventing firms from raising prices unilaterally); on the other hand, any firm in an oligopoly which lowers its prices will mostly likely be matched by competitors, resulting in small increases in sales but decreases in revenues (for all the firms in that market). This effect can potentially produce a kinked demand-curve where the kink lies at the point of the current price-level in the market. These results depend on the elasticity of the demand curve and on the properties of each market.

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