"Monopoly is against the interest of the consumer." To what extent do you agree with this statement and why?

Monopolies can be national (royal mail), regional (water companies) or local (petrol station). Unlike a perfect competition situation were firms are 'price takers' and only respond to consumer demand, a monopoly finds itself in an imperfect competition market. In this type of market the firm is more of a 'price maker' and can therefore influence the market price. When comparing monopoly and perfect competition under the same conditions, we can find that the monopolist when …

…only telecommunications company; its prices were much too high, once new companies came into the market their prices had to come down due to the price competition that they were now facing. In general I feel that for a consumer's interest, we need competition within most industries to keep prices down, which unfortunately a monopoly does not provide. Bibliography. Economics: A mini text, Buckingham, D. 1997 Principles of Economics; Henderson and Poole.1991 www.economic.co.uk