competition, it can charge any price it wishes, subject to the demand curve. While a monopoly, by definition,

refers to a single firm, in practice people often use the term to describe a market in which one firm merely has

a very high market share. This tends to be the definition that the U.S. Department of Justice uses.

Even though there are very few true monopolies in existence, we do deal with some of those few every day,

often without realizing it: The U.S. Postal Service, your electric, and garbage collection companies are a few

examples. Some new drugs are produced by only one pharmaceutical firm—and no close substitutes for that

drug may exist.

From the mid-1990s until 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted the Microsoft Corporation for

including Internet Explorer as the default web browser with its operating system. The Justice Department’s

argument was that, since Microsoft possessed an extremely high market share in the industry for operating
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