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Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, individuals, economic and social groups, etc. The rivalry can be over attainment of any exclusive goal, including recognition.
Competition occurs in nature, between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment. Animals compete over water supplies, food, mates, and other biological resources. usually compete for food and mates, though when these needs are met deep rivalries often arise over the pursuit of wealth, power, prestige, and celebrity when in a static, repetitive, or unchanging environment. Competition is a major tenet of market economy and business, often associated with business competition as companies are in competition with at least one other firm over the same group of customers. Competition inside a company is usually stimulated with the larger purpose of meeting and reaching higher quality of services or improved products that the company may produce or develop.
Competition is often considered to be the opposite of cooperation; however, in the real world, mixtures of cooperation and competition are the norm. In economies, as the philosopher R. G. Collingwood argued "the presence of these two opposites together is essential to an economic system. The parties to an economic action co-operate in competing, like two chess players". Optimal strategies to achieve goals are studied in the branch of mathematics known as game theory.
Competition has been studied in several fields, including psychology, sociology and anthropology. Social , for instance, study the nature of competition. They investigate the natural urge of competition and its circumstances. They also study group dynamics, to detect how competition emerges and what its effects are. , meanwhile, study the effects of competition on society as a whole. Additionally, study the history and prehistory of competition in various cultures. They also investigate how competition manifested itself in various culture settings in the past, and how competition has developed over time.
Competition between members of a species ("intraspecific") for resources such as food, water, territory, and sunlight may result in an increase in the frequency of a variant of the species best suited for survival and reproduction until its fixation within a population. However, competition among resources also has a strong tendency for diversification between members of the same species, resulting in coexistence of competitive and non-competitive strategies or cycles between low and high competitiveness. Third parties within a species often favour highly competitive strategies leading to species extinction when environmental conditions are harsh (evolutionary suicide).
Competition is also present between species ("interspecific"). When resources are limited, several species may depend on these resources. Thus, each of the species competes with the others to gain access to the resources. As a result, species less suited to compete for the resources may extinction unless they adaptation by character dislocation, for instance. According to evolutionary theory, this competition within and between species for resources plays a significant role in natural selection. At shorter time scales, competition is also one of the most important factors controlling diversity in ecological communities, but at larger scales expansion and contraction of ecological space is a much larger factor than competition. This is illustrated by living plant communities where asymmetric competition and competitive dominance frequently occur. Multiple examples of symmetric and asymmetric competition also exist for animals.
People that enjoy entering competitions are known as compers.
The term also applies to econometrics. Here, it is a comparative measure of the ability and performance of a firm or sub-sector to sell and produce/supply goods and/or services in a given market. The two academic bodies of thought on the assessment of competitiveness are the Structure Conduct Performance Paradigm and the more contemporary New Empirical Industrial Organisation model. Predicting changes in the competitiveness of business sectors is becoming an integral and explicit step in public policymaking. Within capitalist economic systems, the drive of enterprises is to maintain and improve their own competitiveness.
One-upmanship, also called "one-upsmanship", is the art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor. The term was first used in the title of a book by Stephen Potter, published in 1952In full, One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teachings of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Games Lifemastery. as a follow-up to The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating) (1947), and Lifemanship titles in his series of tongue-in-cheek , and film and television derivatives, that teach various ploys to achieve this. This comic satire of self-help style guides manipulates traditional British conventions for the gamester, all life being a game, who understands that if you're not one-up, you're one-down. Potter's unprincipled principles apply to almost any possession, experience or situation, deriving maximum undeserved rewards and discomfitting the opposition. The 1960 film School for Scoundrels and its 2006 remake were satiric portrayals of how to use Potter's ideas. This tactic has been used to levels of wizardry by an Air Force intelligence non commissioned office Master Sergeant Rhoads, who would use one-upmanship with such gusto and punctuality that he received the moniker Elevenorife (as a play on the popular British holiday playground of Tenorife)
In that context, the term refers to a satiric course in the required for the systematic and conscious practice of "creative intimidation", making one's associates feel inferior and thereby gaining the status of being "one-up" on them. Viewed seriously, it is a phenomenon of group dynamics that can have significant effects in the management field: for instance, manifesting in office politics. (2025). 9781119094319, John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781119094319
One-downmanship, is the art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor, by means of ignorance or naiveté. The term was first coined in 2013 at Elgin Air Force base when it was noticed that multiple Airman would successfully one down their interlocutors with extreme ignorance of the subjects of conversation. It then dawned on the creator that this tactic (whether by means of cognition or otherwise) was pervasive throughout the military and deserved to be documented. A person who has used this tactic to levels of mastery is Chief Petty Officer David Blausey, who will infuriate his confabulators to great effect by responses such as "Blueberry? I've never heard of those" to a conversation about berries.
However, other studies such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking show that the effect of competition on students depends on each individual's level of agency. Students with a high level of agency thrive on competition, are self-motivated, and are willing to risk failure. Compared to their counterparts who are low in agency, these students are more likely to be flexible, adaptable and creative as adults.
However, competition may also lead to wasted (duplicated) effort and to increased (and prices) in some circumstances. For example, the intense competition for the small number of superstar leads many aspiring musicians and actors to make substantial investments in training which are not recouped, because only a fraction become successful. Critics have also argued that competition can be destabilizing, particularly competition between certain financial institutions.
Experts have also questioned the constructiveness of competition in profitability. It has been argued that competition-oriented objectives are counterproductive to raising revenues and profitability because they limit the options of strategies for firms as well as their ability to offer innovative responses to changes in the market. In addition, the strong desire to defeat rival firms with competitive prices has the strong possibility of causing .
Another distinction appearing in economics is that between competition as an end-state – as in the case of both perfect and imperfect competition – and competition as a process. It is a process of rivalry between firms (or consumers) intensifying selective pressures for improvements. One can restate this as a process of discovery.
Three levels of end-state economic competition have been classified:
In addition, companies compete for finance on the capital markets (equity or debt) in order to generate the necessary cash for their operations. Investor typically consider alternative investment opportunities given their risk profile, and not only look at companies just competing on product ( direct competitors). Enlarging the investment universe to include indirect competitors leads to a broader peer universe of comparable, indirectly competing companies.
Competition does not necessarily have to be between companies. For example, sometimes refer to internal competition. This is competition within companies. The idea was first introduced by Alfred Sloan at General Motors in the 1920s. Sloan deliberately created areas of overlap between divisions of the company so that each division would compete with the other divisions. For example, the Chevrolet division would compete with the Pontiac division for some . The competing brands by the same company allowed parts to be designed by one division and shared by several divisions, for example parts designed by Chevrolet would also be used by Pontiac. In 1931 Procter & Gamble initiated a deliberate system of internal brand-versus-brand rivalry. The company was organized around different , with each brand allocated resources, including a dedicated group of employees willing to champion the brand. Each brand manager was given responsibility for the success or failure of the brand, and compensated accordingly.
Most businesses also encourage competition between individual employees. An example of this is a contest between sales representatives. The sales representative with the highest sales (or the best improvement in sales) over a period of time would gain benefits from the employer. This is also known as intra-brand competition.
Shalev and Asbjornsen found that success (i.e. the saving resulted) of correlated most closely with competition. The literature widely supported the importance of competition as the primary driver of reverse auctions success. Their findings appear to support that argument, as competition correlated strongly with the reverse auction success, as well as with the number of bidders.
Business and economic competition in most country is often limited or restricted. Competition often is subject to legal restrictions. For example, competition may be legally prohibited, as in the cases of a government monopoly or of a government-granted monopoly. Governments may institute tariffs, subsidies or other protectionist measures in order to prevent or reduce competition. Depending on the respective economic policy, pure competition is to a greater or lesser extent regulated by competition policy and competition law. Another component of these activities is the discovery process, with instances of higher government regulations typically leading to less competitive businesses being launched.
Nicholas Gruen has referred to The Competition Delusion, in which competition is taken to be unambiguously good, even where that competition leaks into the rules of the game. He claims this drives financialisation (the approximate doubling of proportion of economic resources dedicated to finance and to 'rule making and administering' professions such as law, accountancy and auditing.
In all three cases, competition law aims to protect the consumer welfare by ensuring that each business must compete for its share of the market economy.
Game theory is a major method used in mathematical economics and business for Economic model competing behaviors of interacting agents. Applications include a wide array of economic phenomena and approaches, such as , bargaining, mergers & acquisitions pricing, fair division, Duopoly, Oligopoly, social network formation, agent-based computational economics, general equilibrium, mechanism design, and ; and across such broad areas as experimental economics, behavioral economics, information economics, industrial organization, and political economy.
This research usually focuses on particular sets of strategies known as Solution concept. A common assumption is that players act rationally. In non-cooperative games, the most famous of these is the Nash equilibrium. A set of strategies is a Nash equilibrium if each represents a best response to the other strategies. If all the players are playing the strategies in a Nash equilibrium, they have no unilateral incentive to deviate, since their strategy is the best they can do given what others are doing. Game-theoretic model to examine the two tradeoffs in the acquisition of information for a careful balancing act Research paper INSEAD
Using a simple concept to measure heights that firms can climb may help improve execution of strategies. International competitiveness can be measured on several criteria but few are as flexible and versatile to be applied across levels as Trade Competitiveness Index (TCI)
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