The situation is very special in capital intensive industries like this. When you have to invest and thus borrow huge sums of money to create a business everyone involved is keenly aware that competition can put the entire investment at risk. Many times in the past firms and whole industries have gone bankrupt (e.g. cars, airplanes, steel).

This is why capital intensive industries typically are dominated by a small number, often just one, of big firms. This has been well studied in a branch of economics called Industrial Organization.

A standard reference is Sutton's "Sunk Costs and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration" (2007) http://www.amazon.com/Sunk-Costs-Market-Structure-Concentrat...