Competition is adversarial behaviour that can be thought of as the inversion of collaboration. Competition is the basis of any evolutionary principle, where the creation and deletion of traits tries to trend towards an equilibrium on a distribution between life and death.
Evolution
Evolution is the fundamental strategy of advancing any system by permutation of its own copies. Mechanically, the process of evolving implies the crossing of an evolutionary threshold, which may be subject to evolution itself. That is to say evolutionary thresholds are moving targets, since entropy continuously shapes the utility functions of any involved system. Traits aiding the crossing of evolutionary thresholds may persist without expending much energy at all, if the traits in question are already perfectly adapted. Less fortunate traits may require more effort to survive, pointing to inherent asymmetric dynamics within those systems.
Markets
Markets are the foundation of the economic success of the human species. The structural design of a marketplace allows for the exchange of energy between at least two interest groups. Exchanging one quantity of energy for another is defined by the terms of a transaction. Those transactions in turn must be accurately facilitated using a system that can guarantee the legitimate reconciliation of the agreed upon terms. Energy exchanges do typically require the exchange of similar kinds of energy, which creates the common but little known problem of the coincidence of wants1. This problem is commonly solved using layers of abstractions that allow for the generalization of economically relevant energy. This abstraction layer is colloquially referred to as money2.