Chapter 17 Blog Post

In this chapter, Mankiw discusses oligopolies. It talks about the difficulties of maintaining such a market due to the greed of an individual firms and antitrust laws. It also talks about the many theories that go into maintaing an efficient market. I thought that this chapter was actually pretty easy to understand, because the chapter basically described something that fell in between perfectly competition and monopoly. I found it fairly easy to understand why oligopolies might've wanted to form cartels through collusion, and why it might've been a problem. It also made sense to how too many would just create another competitive market. Something that actually didn't quite make sense to me was the in depth game theory ideals. The stuff discussing Bonnie and Clyde kind of confused me, because I feel as though oligopolies would talk before making any decision. If this were the case then prisoner theory wouldn't actually be a problem worth worrying about (unless selfishness were the only factor driving decisions).  Other than that the chapter was pretty interesting and I can't wait to have it throughly explained in class as I find that to be really helpful.

Chapter 16 Blog Post

This chapter begins by discussing/ exploring the idea that monopolies have the potential to also be competitive. This idea confused me from the beginning, as I thought that monopolies were characterized as having no competition what so ever. I know that I will struggle to grasp this chapter as I was able to get by the previous one with this understanding. It'll be a pain trying to distinguish markets, oligopolies, and markets in this aspect now since they're like all very similar. I also really thought that there were no close substitutes in the market when there was a monopoly so the fact that competition happens due to potential replacements definitely confuses me.

Besides this concept (really just the beginning) this chapter was not that bad. I was definitely able to understand the long and short run affects for the monopolistic market. It all made sense, because the previous chapter helped us understand what dictates profit and everything. I don't quite understand why it is so desirable to exactly break even, however I do know that that is a good place to be regardless so I might bring it up in class, or just shut up about it, depending on further reading/ rereading.

Chapter 15 Blog Post

Shahid Monametsi

This Chapter discuss the affects and rises of monopolies. I think that this is actually a fairly simple chapter to sink one's teeth into as this was not a very difficult chapter. I thought that this was fairly simple, because the we have kind of touched on the topic of monopolies and their power however it is nice to finally read the extent of their power. In this chapter you not only read about what they are (along with real world applications), but also the regulations put in place to check their power. This was once again easy to take in, because we have covered the idea that government intervention is necessary so that the market (perfect or not) works at full efficiency.

If I had to really pick something tricky about this chapter, it would be the fact that there was so much covered in a single chapter. If I do recall this was same stuff was covered for markets, however it took around 4 or 5 chapters to summarize all of the knowledge pertaining to deadweight loss, government intervention etc. I know that it should be easy to understand to an extent, however I had a troubles taking in all of the information and I know that this will definitely mess me up on the test.