New Zealand’s competition authority, the Commerce Commission, defines markets in terms of five dimensions (see Figure 1).
- The goods or services supplied and purchased (the product dimension)
- The geographic area from which the goods or services are obtained, or within which the goods or services are supplied (the geographic dimension)
- The level in the production or distribution chain (the functional dimension)
- The time frame or timing within which the market operates, where relevant (the temporal dimension), and
- The different customer types within a market, where relevant (the customer dimension).
Figure 1: Dimensions of Market Definition
