Predatory pricing to the point of establishing a monopoly is rare. Long story short, no one can afford to do it unless they already have a lock on production.
Standard Oil did not become a monopoly exclusively because of low prices, but also because they controlled so much of the production -- which is what allowed them, via economies of scale, to undercut pricing in the first place. Unlike Amazon, they also operated in an environment without antitrust regulation.
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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
....you don't fly much, do you? Evidence of tremendous price increases when US Airways gets an exclusive route out of Philadelphia is overwhelming.
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Sorry, that's not evidence of an abuse of monopoly pricing.
If US Airways is the only one running that route, then demand for that route is almost certainly low, which means the price will be high. That's not monopoly abuse, that's basic economics.
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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Best Buy, WalMart, B&N, etc. never got as big a market share as I think Amazon has the potential to get in books.
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Erk?
B&N was the 800-pound gorilla of the book world before Amazon came on the scene. They spent years devastating the competition, especially the independent stores that couldn't possibly match B&N's volume. The industry was terrified when B&N announced it wanted to merge with Ingram, the biggest book distributor -- who distributed books to B&N's competitors.
They had every advantage, but belly-flopped when it came to online sales. They weren't willing to cannibalize store sales, and when they realized they had no choice, they didn't execute well. They were slow to put out the Nook, but even with a few glitches they've done much better with the ebook transition than they did with the online sales transition.