Ontology of market power from Hegel Recognition, asymmetry and imperfect competition in neoclassical economics

This paper proposes a philosophical reconstruction of the problem of market power grounded in the Hegelian ontology of recognition. Against the image of the market as a neutral coordination mechanism that pervades much of the neoclassical paradigm, it argues that imperfect competition and game theory compel the introduction of a different ontological foundation: the market as a practical world of conflictive mediations where asymmetry is not an external accident but an internal possibility of economic sociality. The central thesis holds that the dialectic of recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit provides a conceptual grammar for understanding why differentiation, strategic interdependence and barriers to entry produce relatively stable positions of domination, and why such positions can be sustained without visible violence, through contracts, prices, reputations and strategic equilibria. The contribution of this paper consists in showing that market power is the economic form of stabilized asymmetric recognition, and that imperfect competition reveals an ontology of the market which perfect competition presupposes without thematizing. The argument is further grounded in the empirical literature of the last decade, which documents the rise of markups, the consolidation of digital platforms and algorithmic collusion as contemporary manifestations of this ontological structure.