Perfect Competition Quotes

• Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

  Peter Thiel

  Running, Long, Perfect

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.22, Crown Business

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• I am convinced that both markets and free trade are good, but the traditional answer that we give to students to explain why they are good, the one based on perfect competition and Pareto optimality, is becoming untenable. Something much more interesting and more complicated is going on here

  Paul Romer

  Perfect, Interesting, Giving

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• Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.

  Paul Samuelson

  Perfect, Competition, Tools

  Paul Anthony Samuelson (2014). “Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis: Selected Essays”, p.419, Cambridge University Press

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• From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.

  George Gilder

  Order, Punishment, Keys

  George Gilder (2013). “Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World”, p.20, Regnery Publishing

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• A colleague saw the same model-calibrating the elasticity of demand facing a Cournot oligopolist as a function of the number of firms in the industry--described at the University of Chicago and at M.I.T. A Chicago economist derived the formula and said, "Look at how few firms you need to get close to infinite elasticities and perfect competition." An M.I.T. economist derived the same formula and said, "Look at how large n has to be before you get anywhere close to an infinite elasticity and perfect competition."

  Matthew Rabin

  Numbers, Perfect, Competition

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