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EGarrett comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong
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How can there be a monopoly if people can use more than one dating site?
Unless OkCupid bans you from putting your profile up on other sites, you can just as easily put a profile on another site with less people, if the site seems promising.
It's still more work to put a profiles on multiple sites.
Hi Eugine,
I don't mean to be nitpicking, but a monopoly is a very specific thing. It's quite different than it just being inconvenient to switch to a competitor. In very many cases in normal market competition, it's inconvenient to switch to competitors (buying a new car or house, changing your insurance, and so on), but that doesn't effect the quality of the product. Similarly, for a monopoly to effect the quality of OKCupid's service, it would have to be a very specific situation, and different than what currently exists, which seems to be quite normal market functioning.
Coscott was talking about a "a natural drift towards a monopoly".
Unless OKCupid is hiring the government or people with guns to threaten other websites out of existence, there won't be a drift towards a monopoly.
A monopoly isn't created by one company getting the overwhelming majority of customers. A monopoly is only created when competitors cannot enter the market. It's a subtle distinction but it's very important, because what's implied is that the company with the monopoly can jack up their prices and abuse customers. They can't do this without feeding a garden of small competitors that can and will outgrow them (see Myspace, America Online, etc), unless those competitors are disallowed from ever existing.
You can keep downvoting this, but it's a very important concept in economics and it will still be true.