This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice. What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

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Gormo 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

> This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice.

So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality.

> What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them.

Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place.

Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise.

Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.

	▲	Arainach a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I would suggest reading some history rather than economic fantasy. It's not "a competitive environment" just because it's legal to found a company if anticompetitive tactics are allowed. You can start a railroad, but if the big existing railroads that already have lines running to the cities and factories refuse to let you connect to their service, your company has no hope of surviving. You can start a factory making paperclips, but if the incumbent has billions of dollars in reserves and can afford to sell at a loss or barely above cost you will never be able to grow and thrive. You can make a lot more money talking to your competitors and agreeing to fix prices or to each operate in regions that happen to not overlap, eliminating competition. You can tell customers that if they want to buy product X that they want, they have to buy a bundle that includes Y, meaning that any competitors to Y are bound to fail since customers are already buying that version anyway. This is just the tip of the iceberg. "History of antitrust" will give you any number of real world examples.