Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price¶
A competition-law hypothetical-monopolist test that expands a candidate market until a small durable price increase would be profitable.
Core Idea¶
SSNIP magnitude, time horizon, price benchmark, critical-loss method, evidence and jurisdictional guidance vary; the cellophane fallacy makes prevailing monopoly prices an unsafe baseline. Starting from a candidate product and geography, analysts posit control by one supplier, estimate substitution and lost sales under a price increase and add the closest substitutes until the increase becomes profitable. The abstraction is therefore identified by a declared carrier, a transformation or constraint over that carrier, and an invariant that tells an analyst whether the named structure is genuinely present.
Scope of Application¶
Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price belongs to competition law and is useful where the analyst can specify the typed competition law carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets, then evaluate the jurisdiction and legal question, candidate products and geography, benchmark price, price increase and duration, hypothetical monopolist, demand substitution evidence, critical loss and actual loss, supply responses, profitability criterion and stopping rule are explicit. The scope is broad within that domain but bounded by the need for the jurisdiction and legal question, candidate products and geography, benchmark price, price increase and duration, hypothetical monopolist, demand substitution evidence, critical loss and actual loss, supply responses, profitability criterion and stopping rule are explicit.
Clarity¶
The abstraction clarifies a crowded vocabulary by making the jurisdiction and legal question, candidate products and geography, benchmark price, price increase and duration, hypothetical monopolist, demand substitution evidence, critical loss and actual loss, supply responses, profitability criterion and stopping rule are explicit the center of the account. A claim should name the carrier, the governing operation or relation, the applicable assumptions, and the recognition test.
Manages Complexity¶
Without the abstraction, an analyst must reason directly over many local details: the carrier roles, admissibility assumptions, competing conventions, derived invariants, boundary cases, and proof or validation obligations specific to Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price. Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price compresses them into the roles in the structural signature. That compression permits comparison across instances without erasing the variables that determine validity. It also exposes which details may be varied safely and which are constitutive.
Abstract Reasoning¶
- Identify the carrier. State what the elements, states, objects, or observations are: the typed competition law carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets. Reject examples whose alleged carrier belongs to a different problem. 2. Lock the constitutive rule. Express the jurisdiction and legal question, candidate products and geography, benchmark price, price increase and duration, hypothetical monopolist, demand substitution evidence, critical loss and actual loss, supply responses, profitability criterion and stopping rule are explicit independently of one notation or implementation.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Knowledge transfers strongly among subfields of competition law because they reuse the typed competition law carrier, including objects, relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundaries, and comparison targets, Starting from a candidate product and geography, analysts posit control by one supplier, estimate substitution and lost sales under a price increase and add the closest substitutes until the increase becomes profitable., and type the carrier, state every parameter and convention in the definition, test that the jurisdiction and legal question, candidate products and geography, benchmark price, price increase and duration, hypothetical monopolist, demand substitution evidence, critical loss and actual loss, supply responses, profitability criterion and stopping rule are explicit, compare the nearest accepted identity, and report counterexamples, uncertainty, and limiting cases.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
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Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price is a kind of Threshold Prime
The proposed strict upward parent is
prime:threshold.
Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root
- Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price → Threshold
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Small but significant and non-transitory increase in price sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (18th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.
Family — Market Power, Pricing & Procurement (25 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Cornering the market — 0.95
- Monopolization — 0.92
- Market concentration — 0.91
- Quasi-property — 0.91
- Name your own price — 0.91
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08