Alfred P. Sloan Quotes

Competition is good for consumers. It provides more choices at better prices.

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities

When you’re dealing with a commodity, high productivity means that nobody makes any money.

I believe in the principle that if you have more competition, it will drive down the prices.

Most things that people want already exist, and with Amazon or eBay, there is always someone who is willing to undercut your price.

When the price of a drug rises, it becomes profitable and the target of new competition.

Tell me, what do they do for us in Bulgaria? Do they fix the prices? Or is there some kind of a free market?

Increasingly prices are set by sellers to raise their prices without a loss of sales sufficient to wipe out the gain.

A common price isn't the lowest price. It will most obviously be the highest price.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.

I think in just about any business the low cost competitor is always going to have an advantage.

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

That iPad you just bought. Do you care that it cost a few pence to manufacture? No. It's cost you several hundred pounds because somebody else was willing to pay that much for it. If they weren't... it wouldn't.

Competition to the economist is predatory pricing to the business person.

I don't think it's good in any business for anyone to have a monopoly. On the other hand, you need to have size to get costs down.

Everybody's doing it. In capitalism, you try to get the highest price you can for a product.

Competing at full price is the way we like to do business, but we cannot ignore the promotional environment.

In a free market capitalist system, 'price signals' are everything. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers in the free market, and these prices are broadcast from the exchanges, reaching all corners of the economy - where they are used to transact business.

When you have more competition, you have better products and lower prices.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

It is commonly our Scots way to do little business but squeeze up high prices, whereas it would much more real advantage to enlarge the business, have the profit, though small upon it, yet many smalls to make a great.

What is “destructive competition” for producers is a bargain bonanza for consumers.

The consumer knows that his prices are made for him by those who control the avenues of trade and the highways of commerce.