[music] Welcome to Week 6 of my Microeconomics principles. I am talking to you here from the Research Park at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I thought this was a good place to start Week 6 when we talk about competition, because a Research Park is basically an association the University has with many different companies in order to allow them to operate at a low cost, by sharing some of their resources or inputs they need. For instance, in this building we have right now, we have companies such as Yahoo, John Deere, chemical companies like Dow Chemical, ADM Sierra Ventures Capital Industry cinema industries, Dreamscape Cinema statistical in Strata, Caterpillar, so, so I know many others that are kind of spread out in six or different, or seven different buildings in this part of the campus. And it's, it's, it's interesting and it's relevant because what these companies can do by kind of being in this so-called incubators, is to share some of the administrative costs secretary stuff, and in order to cut costs, and also they're able to communicate better with each other, since they are so integrated, right? A company like Yahoo might actually need to coordinate their productions or, or services with a company like Strata that provides you know, statistical services, and so forth. So, what are we going to do this week? Well, first, we're going to talk a little bit about market structure and the different type of market structure we can talk about and how that influence the, the, the opportunity a company has for pricing. And then, we focus our models, our concepts on the market structure called perfect competition. We basically said that the only way that companies can compete with each other is by trying to cut cost and be the most effect, efficient that they can. And when that situation occur, is where we have that idea of the survival of the fittest in the business world. And where companies trying to make themselves better off by trying to cut costs, and this is a good example of that, of places like this. They actually drive technology down up, and make products a lot cheaper for consumers. So, we talked about at the end of the of the, of the week, about the long-run competitive equilibrium model. So, we'll be back here at the end of the week to kind of answer the question we established at the beginning of the week, which is how computer power has gotten so, so good and so cheap, in so few, in so little time. [music] Produced by OCE Atlas Digital Media at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.