Perfect Competition

We have learned that in the perfect competitive market, all the sellers are the same, all the buyers are the same, and no one has the right the change the price because the supply and demand curves are perfect elastic. If a seller simply raises the price, it will drive buyers to other sellers; likewise, if a buyer wants to pay a lower price, it will drive sellers to other buyers. However, it is recently reported by CNN news that “buyers in competitive housing markets try to win over sellers with love letters and family photos.” (Dear seller, I knew it was love…) And it’s true that some seller did moved by the gesture. In a perfect competitive market, people can still earn extra profit by emotionally attaching. A seller would be more willing to sell at a lower price if he or she received a love letter from the buyer and had talked and set up friendly relationship with the buyer. He or she would believe that the nice buyer should be welcomed by the neighborhood. I think it might be a kind of off-trading competition since it involves more personal communication. Not only do the buyers win sellers in different way, some sellers use special treatment to win their buyers, too. As I have seen in China, some salesmen tried to first get to know the chose buyer, then talked about things they prefer to hear in order to sell the products at a higher profit. The salesmen spend so much time doing so because they can share a portion of the extra profit. These are my understanding of perfect competitive market, although it’s a price taker model, people can still influence the market-price by some means.