Competition and Monopoly

We are now going to look at competition and monopoly. Is competition a state, or is it a process? We have already said that entrepreneurship, by its very nature, is always competitive, and that the word “competition” derives from the Latin cumpetitio, which means “the concurrence of multiple requests for the same thing, which must be assigned an owner.” Competition, dear students, is a dynamic process of rivalry. It’s a “movie”; there is “movement.” What do we mean to say with this analogy between competition and a movie? Well, the most intimate essence of competition lies in its being a dynamic process in which countless entrepreneurs participate by vying with each other to discover or detect before anyone else the latent profit opportunities in the entrepreneurial process, and they act accordingly to take advantage of them. It is a process of emulation. It is a process of trying to surpass our rivals in all areas by creating or perceiving profit opportunities before others do. That should be clear at this point in the course, because we have repeated it over and over again.