You would have paid more, but didn't, and so you got some benefit. A monopoly lowers your consumer surplus because it has market power that determines how close the actual price gets to the ...

A simple example is pricing power. If a business is a private monopoly then it will use its market power to extract maximum profit from consumers. It will meet consumer preferences, but at a price.

Economists study consumer surplus to understand questions ranging from the existence of a monopoly to the value of innovation. For this study, Levitt and his fellow researchers turned to Uber’s ...