I don&#x27;t think I missed your point. I think I said that a rational duopoly won&#x27;t bother worrying about what economical solution best prevents a third entrant, when there is always the possibility of simply paying from established wealth to compensate a would-be entrant for their willingness to not enter.<p>I don&#x27;t see it as a political problem. It&#x27;s such a ubiquitous part of any real market that I just see it was a way in which typical econ toy problems fail to correspond to reality and fail to produce useful predictions. It&#x27;s like trying to use Newtonian physics when quantum effects really matter, except you&#x27;ve got so many economists employed because of the Newtonian-like toy models and they have a real need to keep hand waving and trying to convince everyone that the Newtonian approximations matter, that deriving theoretical results like this matter to &quot;build intuition&quot; or &quot;create the mathematical framework&quot; or whatever, but it&#x27;s just clearly not true or useful to anyone but those researchers themselves.