ABSTRACT
In the industrial organization (IO) model familiar to students of media economics and management (Albarran, 2002; Picard, 1989), competition is conceptualized as emanating from the number of firms in an industry and the type of products produced by the firms within the industry. In the IOmodel, competition is at its strongest in themarket structure called pure or perfect competition, which exhibits a large number of firms producing homogeneous products. By contrast, competition isweakest in suchmarket structures as differentiated oligopolies, which are characterized by a small number of firms producing differentiated products.
