Limit price

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Competition law

Basic concepts
History of competition law Monopolization Coercive monopoly Natural monopoly Barriers to entry Market power SSNIP test Relevant market Merger control
Anti-competitive practices
Collusion Formation of cartels Price fixing Product bundling and tying Refusal to deal Group boycott Exclusive dealing Bid rigging Dividing territories Conscious parallelism Predatory pricing Misuse of patents and copyrights
Laws and doctrines
United States Sherman Antitrust Act Clayton Antitrust Act Robinson-Patman Act Federal Trade Commission Act Merger guidelines Essential facilities doctrine Noerr-Pennington doctrine Rule of reason Europe European Community competition law Irish Competition Law Competition Act 1998 (U.K.) Australia Trade Practices Act 1974
Enforcement authorities and organizations
International Competition Network List of competition regulators
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A Limit Price is the price set by a monopolist to discourage economic entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries. The limit price is the price that the entrant would face upon entering as long as the incumbent firm did not decrease output. The limit price is often lower than the average cost of production or just low enough to make entering not profitable.
The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.
The problem with limit pricing as strategic behavior is that once the entrant has entered the market, the quantity used as a threat to deter entry is no longer the incumbent firm's best response. This means that for limit pricing to be an effective deterrent to entry, the threat must in some way be made credible. A way to achieve this is for the incumbent firm to constrain itself to produce a certain quantity whether entry occurs or not. An example of this would be if the firm signed a union contract to employ a certain (high) level of labor for a long period of time. ^[1]