imperfect competition

imperfect competition
A market situation with a limited number of sellers. This is also known as monopolistic competition: each firm realizes that the price it can charge is a decreasing function of the quantity it sells, so that it faces a downward-sloping demand curve. Imperfect competition assumes that sellers do not attempt to forecast the reactions of individual competitors; this is contrasted with oligopoly, which assumes that firms take account of the expected reactions of individual rivals.