Logan is shopping for a new car

1 

The companies, Ford, GM and Chrysler/ Dodge all come under an Oligopolistic market structure where there are few suppliers of a product ( American cars ) yet buyers are in many numbers.

As Logan noticed, a lot of the products of these manufacturers have similar price points and some similar features. This is due to the fact that, firms in an oligopoly collude with each other for price and output decisions.

With this, companies such as Ford, Chrysler etc set their products of similar variants to similar price ranges. For example, a Ford Mustang 2020 starts at a price range of $27,000 and a Dodge Challenger 2019 starts at a price range of $27,300, given that both the cars come under the same category fixed by their manufacturers.

These companies, avoid price wars (a technique to compete against each other by reducing price) that lead to losses, and fix prices in a similar range. They compete among each other by offering different features in their products, using unique marketing strategies and offering different type of payment methods and loan schemes that helps the buyer to pay-off for the vehicle.

Thus, these car manufacturers are part of an oligopolistic market structure where they collude with each other for price and output decisions yet compete amongst each other in non-price methods such as product features, marketing techniques etc.  

2 

Not a single country had a policy against money laundering before twenty years ago. Still only few countries have adopted anti-money laundering policies. In developing nations, implementation of effective policy against money laundering was proved to be failure. The main factors responsible for the failure of anti money laundering measures are following :-   

1. Inadvertent use of banking system for money laundering

2. Increased governance: Banks and other financial institutions can find difficult to manage cross border AML compliance requirements due to high governance.

3. Lack of skilled personnel: Lack of skilled resources with higher knowledge was another reason for the failure of anti money laundering measures. 4. Complicated process and technology: Banks have to create infrastructure for cross channel detection of suspicious activities, improved data quality. It will be highly a complicated process especially for banks in developing nations. 5. Poor validation of data and methodological inconsistencies. It creates a huge gap between the objective of policy and its results.

The measures should be undertaken to address the negative impact of AML measures are-

1. Focus on digital payment related issues like mobile wallets, e-payments, e-money issuers.

2. Use of third party utilities such as shared services utility model for Know Your Customer compliance, managed services for transaction monitoring etc, 3.Adoption of analytics for AML initiatives for fraud detection ,conduct screening, detection of rogue activities, linking customers and their accounts and linking their transaction through accounts.