1) Budweiser (now owned by a Belgium based beer company called InBev), Miller and Coors who together produce 85% of all beer consumed in the US, each spend well over $250 million a year on television advertising campaigns, promoting their beer brands. Obviously, if one firm is advertising its brands heavily, the others must also advertise to defend their market shares.
Do you think these firms would welcome congressional legislation which restricted the amount that any one firm could spend on advertising to $1 million yearly, and thereby allowed them all to drastically reduce their costs without fear of losing ground to each other? Are wireless telephone companies in the US market conducting the same practice of non-price competition? Explain your answer in both cases.
2) ”Most commercial fish species in nearly every ocean and sea are being rapidly depleted in what marine biologists and other specialists warn is evolving into one of the worst ecological disasters of modern times. According to the United Nations, the world’s 15 million fishermen and 23 million tons of fishing vessels represent twice as much fishing power as major stocks of fish can sustain.” Assume that ocean fishing resembles a competitive market in the following ways…there are no significant barriers to entry and there are enough individual fishermen so that none of them can affect the market price of fish.
a) Explain why competitive markets normally lead profit maximizing firms to make choices about resource use that lead to an "efficient" allocation of resources to the market?
b) If unregulated competitive markets promote "efficient" patterns of resource use, why has unregulated competition led to such serious over allocation of resources to fishing?