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You know nothing about markets or real life market engagement if you blindly believe "competition is always good for consumers". There are costs to competition
by Affric 3y ago
You know nothing about markets or real life market engagement if you blindly believe "competition is always good for consumers".
There are costs to competition, inherently. Competition is only of benefit to consumers if they capture the more of the new surplus utility generated by competition than they capture the new costs.
There will be marketing costs, there will be the costs of the data policies of these new models, there will be time that consumers have to spend becoming engaged in the market for not only software but also the market for markets for software, they will have to understand a greater amount of technical details of how these software marketplaces perform on their devices.
Now, these costs can be paid internally or externally. And guess what... corps always want these to be externalised. So the user/society can pay these costs and they can rack up unearnt surplus.
- henry2023 3y agoCurious about this answer. Do you have any example in which prices of goods and services actually went up after more competition entered an industry? In case you do, are you sure you aren't cherry picking?
- Affric 3y agoI don't have any of my old economics notes nor the market reports I have read on hand but generally it's natural monopolies that have competition introduced, these are not particularly good analogue for software but they do have similarities with social media and mapping applications. Competition is generally good for consumers who are engaged but it's a means to an end. It is not good for its own sake. Markets where competition works really well are elastic and have consumers with the appropriate amount of engagements from the consumers.