Duopoly
A duopoly or dyopoly (a combination of ancient Greek δύο dyo “two” and πωλεῖν pōlein “sell”) is a form of market in which a large number of buyers are faced with only two providers. The duopoly is thus a special case of the oligopoly . Because of its low complexity, the assumption of a duopoly is often the subject of microeconomic theories.
Duopoly models
The two basic models used when looking at oligopolies are:
- Volume competition
- Cournot oligopoly (after Antoine-Augustin Cournot ), which shows that the two suppliers react to changes in production of the other with the amount offered until a Nash equilibrium is reached.
- Price competition
- Model of the Bertrand competition (after Joseph Bertrand ), which is based on the game-theoretical consideration that both providers act strategically through prices.
With regard to the intensity of competition, no clear statement can be made in the duopoly about the prevailing degree of competitive interaction. Duopoly markets can be characterized by fierce competition through to existence-threatening price wars (for example in the case of chip manufacturers Intel and AMD in the market for microprocessors). On the other hand, the collusion of providers can lead to important competitive mechanisms being undermined.
Duopoly in politics
The duopoly plays an important role in the new political economy , as the political landscape of many countries is characterized by a duopoly. A typical example of this is the USA , where there are only two relevant political parties , the Republicans and the Democrats . The game-theoretical concept of the duopoly is partly applied to the two German people 's parties, the SPD and CDU, and their behavior.
Duopolies in the economy
Real duopoles are rarely found in practice. Examples are:
- The mobile communications market in Germany in the early 1990s, when there were only two mobile communications providers on the German market, T-D1 (now T-Mobile ) and Mannesmann D2 (now Vodafone D2 ).
- The duopoly for wide-body aircraft - Airbus and Boeing are the only providers - is the world's largest and best-known duopoly.
More often - analogous to the quasi-monopolies - there are markets with quasi-duopolies:
- With credit card systems there is a Europe-wide quasi-duopoly between the two providers Mastercard and VISA International Service Association .
- On the PC market, Intel and AMD form quasi-duopoles for the main processors and Nvidia and AMD (formerly ATI ) for the graphics processors.
- The two Swiss retail companies Migros and Coop (Switzerland) , as well as Autoscout24 and Mobile.de, also form a quasi-duopoly when it comes to online car markets.
- In the market for mobile operating systems, Android from Google and iOS from Apple form a quasi-duopoly.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Die Welt about the price war between Intel and AMD
- ↑ autohaus.de: mobile.de for car offers in front ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
