Retail market structure refers to the number of companies that sell similar or identical products in the same geographical area. An oligopoly describes a small group of companies that collude to raise ...

Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 25 years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed. Somer G. Anderson is CPA, doctor of ...

Businesses don't operate in a bubble -- their sales and profitability are affected by the business environment in which they operate. Many factors affect this environment, from regulation and ...

In June 2025, memory was still seen as a classic boom-and-bust business — one where high prices eventually cure high prices ...

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and ...

Media investor Jeff Sagansky predicted that the top four streaming companies are on the precipice of "great profitability" and have effectively formed a new entertainment oligopoly, even though ...

There are four major market structures, which can tell us what the competitive landscape looks like.

"Our food system is an hourglass. In one chamber are tens of thousands of farmers and ranchers, but their sands are steadily receding. In the other are hundreds of millions of eaters, whose sands ...

Behind the scenes of the more obvious oligopolizations we see emerging in today's tech industry — the ones regarding data, computer processing power and consumer attention — is a related but subtler ...

Note: This video is part four of nine of an interview between Morningstar's Christine Benz and Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, at the 2018 Bogleheads conference. Watch the other segments here.