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.