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There is a fair argument to be made that whenever you see a company taking the lion’s share of a market, whether in customers or profit, you’re witnessing a for

• jhanschoo 5y ago
  This depends on the market, though of course it's not the case that a market would naturally tend to the best kind of competitive environment serving it. For example, there is an argument that markets with one incumbent among several competitors can serve a market better, since the incumbent will have profits through it's economies of scale with which it can reinvest into R&D to serve the market better, that it needs to maintain its incumbency.
• jfengel 5y ago
  That leads to a different market failure: inefficiencies due to redundancy. The free market will, left to its own devices, become less free as the most efficient company dominates. It may buy up its competition or simply outcompete them. That will allow the same amount of goods for less money since the redundant overheads are eliminated. However, the ultimate end state of that is a monopoly, which frees them up to set prices wherever they want. In theory a new company could arise to undercut them, but in practice barriers to entry make that unlikely. So the free market is always in constant tension between healthy competition and unhealthy inefficiency. The balance of it depends on the ability to differentiate, customer choice, and external regulation -- as well as the overlapping dependencies from supply chains and nearby industries.