ECN 104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Taipei Metro, Market Clearing, Profit Maximization

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2 Nov 2017

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Perfect competition in the short run (ch. 9: market structures. Four market structures: perfect competition- many firms producing a standard product (cotton). Very easy to enter: monopoly- one firm is the sole seller. Produce unique products (regional electrical power supply: monopolistic competition- large number seller producing different products (clothes, books). Easy entry: nonprice competition- firms don"t distinguish the price, but they do distinguish the design and quality (known as production differentiation, oligopoly- few sellers of standardized or differential products. Determine own price and are affected by decisions of rivals. We will be discussing all four of these market models, but first we will start with pure competition. From the continuum, you can see that we are starting at one extreme of the possible market models. The other market models will be discussed in future chapters. Pure competition is rare in the real world, but the model is important. The model helps analyze industries with characteristics similar to pure competition.

Related Questions

What valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value isn't enough -- you also need to capture some of the value you create. This means that even very big businesses can be bad businesses. For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits -- more than 100 times the airline industry's profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. "Perfect competition" is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every firm in a competitive market is undifferentiated and sells the same homogeneous products. Since no firm has any market power, they must all sell at whatever price the market determines. If there is money to be made, new firms will enter the market, increase supply, drive prices down and thereby eliminate the profits that attracted them in the first place. If too many firms enter the market, they'll suffer losses, some will fold, and prices will rise back to sustainable levels. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit. The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits. To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I'm not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: By "monopoly," I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: It hasn't competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo! Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. How much of the world is actually monopolistic? How much is truly competitive? It is hard to say because our common conversation about these matters is so confused. To the outside observer, all businesses can seem reasonably alike, so it is easy to perceive only small differences between them. But the reality is much more binary than that. There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize. The confusion comes from a universal bias for describing market conditions in self-serving ways: Both monopolists and competitors are incentivized to bend the truth. Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly -- usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition. Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn't claim to be a monopoly. But is it one? Well, it depends: a monopoly in what? Let's say that Google is primarily a search engine. As of May 2014, it owns about 68% of the search market. (Its closest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have about 19% and 10%, respectively.) If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary -- as a verb. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen to Bing. But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search-engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search-engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world. What if we frame Google as a multifaceted technology company instead? This seems reasonable enough; in addition to its search engine, Google makes dozens of other software products, not to mention robotic cars, Android phones and wearable computers. But 95% of Google's revenue comes from search advertising; its other products generated just $2.35 billion in 2012 and its consumer-tech products a mere fraction of that. Since consumer tech is a $964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it -- a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention. Non-monopolists tell the opposite lie: "We're in a league of our own." Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition. Suppose you want to start a restaurant in Palo Alto that serves British food. "No one else is doing it," you might reason. "We'll own the entire market." But that is only true if the relevant market is the market for British food specifically. What if the actual market is the Palo Alto restaurant market in general? And what if all the restaurants in nearby towns are part of the relevant market as well? These are hard questions, but the bigger problem is that you have an incentive not to ask them at all. When you hear that most new restaurants fail within one or two years, your instinct will be to come up with a story about how yours is different. You'll spend time trying to convince people that you are exceptional instead of seriously considering whether that is true. It would be better to pause and consider whether there are people in Palo Alto who would rather eat British food above all else. They may well not exist. In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was then the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors -- maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother's recipe -- your business is unlikely to survive. The problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of profits. Imagine you're running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You're not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you've got to fight hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you'll need to squeeze out every efficiency: That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back. A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto -- "Don't be evil" -- is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits. So a monopoly is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do outsize profits come at the expense of the rest of society? Actually, yes: Profits come out of customers' wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation -- but only in a world where nothing changes. In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up. But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better. Even the government knows this: That is why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). It is possible to question whether anyone should really be awarded a monopoly simply for having been the first to think of something like a mobile software design. But something like Apple's monopoly profits from designing, producing and marketing the iPhone were clearly the reward for creating greater abundance, not artificial scarcity: Customers were happy to finally have the choice of paying high prices to get a smartphone that actually works. The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don't strangle innovation. With Apple's iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft's decadeslong operating system dominance. Before that, IBM's hardware monopoly of the 1960s and '70s was overtaken by Microsoft's software monopoly. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cellphone plan from any number of providers. If the tendency of monopoly businesses was to hold back progress, they would be dangerous, and we'd be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of. So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It is a relic of history. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: They see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that is what's easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But the long-run equilibrium predicted by 19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to rest -- also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it is a powerful metaphor. In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death. If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won't matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place. Perfect equilibrium may describe the void that is most of the universe. It may even characterize many businesses. But every new creation takes place far from equilibrium. In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy famously opens "Anna Karenina" by observing: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.

According to the article above by Peter Thiel do you think perfect competition is best for the economy and for consumers? Why or why not? What does Peter Thiel think about perfect competition versus monopolies?

See the question and two answers, give brief your own opinion for each answer( are you agree on disagree with the answer, why?)

Q:This week, we are discussing market types. In this forum, please pick one of the market types that are presented in your textbook and provide your own definition (use your own words) and example. What do you think are the benefits vs. deficiencies of your chosen market type?

Answer 1)

Perfect Competition

This kind of market type stipulates the overall advantage that a market has. In this market, there are many sellers and buyers.These players do not control the price of commodities or services but the prices are controlled by the demand and supply of goods and services. As a result of this, no one can determine the market price of commodities because customers will switch to the next best alternative. All the market players in this sense are price takers and the customers that subscribe to these goods have a lot of experience about the goods offered. It means therefore that they have adequate information about the goods available, which means, therefore, they are aware of the prices that are being charged. All the firms that exist in this kind of market type have a relatively small market share because of the existence of so many of them. The market is also characterized by free entry and exit of firms. New firms can enter the market if they so wish and create competition to the existing firms. Due to this nature of many firms, most of them only earn enough to keep them on the market and nothing more for these firms (Makowski & Ostroy, 2001).

Answer 2)

The Oligopoly; best recognized by few sellers, identical (or similar) products, and its difficult entryinto the market. A good way to determine if a market has an oligopoly is if the change in one seller, causes its "competition" to change likewise. Automotive, cell phone industries, and aviation are some examples of markets that have an oligopoly. In the automotive industry, if one vehicle producer (lets say Chevrolet) changes the body style of its line up, other "completion" is soon to follow. Notice how cars these days are getting nicer and nicer for the base model? Research and Development is greatly valued in an industry that has an oligopoly. This is because if a seller lowers prices, they understand that its competitors will soon follow with ease. But, if they develop a better improvement over its last model in technology, it is much harder to follow than just a reduction in price.

The advantage of an oiligolpoly is that the leaders can set prices instead of take them. Which leads to those that are in charge having the ability to increase profit margins above what they would be in a truly free market.

The disadvantage is that for those looking to try to get into the market will have much difficulty because of the common huge capitol expenditures required to actually compete with the big boys.

1. A reason why there is more competition in the restaurant industry than in the music streaming industry is that restaurants

A.unlike music streaming? companies, have to abide by government sanitation rules.

B.have to cater to a variety of consumer tastes while music streaming companies do not.

C.have more elastic demand for their product compared to music streaming companies.

D.unlike music streaming? companies, do not have significant economies of scale.

2. Why would a government use a patent to block entry to some markets if this hinders competition especially when governments generally promote? competition?

A.Patents are justified because they are an important means for creating network externalities.

B.Patents encourage firms to spend money on research necessary to create new products.

C.Politicians sometimes succumb to pressure from lobbyists to grant favors to businesses for political reasons.

D.Patents are an important source of government revenue.

3.Suppose we can divide all the goods produced by an economy into two? types: consumption goods and capital goods. Capital? goods, such as? machinery, equipment, and? computers, are goods used to produce other goods.

Suppose a technological advance occurs that affects the production of consumption goods but not capital goods.

If a technological advance occurs that affects the production of consumption goods but not capital?goods, then the production possibilities frontier will

A.remain unchanged.

B.shift outward along the consumption goods axis.

C. shift outward along the capital goods axis.

D. shift outward along both axes.

The new production possibilities frontier will indicate that with the technological? advance, more (CAPITAL GOODS /// CONSUMPTION GOODS /// OF BOTH GOODS) can be produced.

4. Market failure is best described as

A.All of the above.

B.when consumption occurs at low social benefit.

C.when the market fails to produce the efficient level of output.

D.when the market fails to produce deadweight loss.

E.when production occurs at high social cost.

The market will fail when which of the following? happen????(Check all that? apply.)

A.When property rights are incomplete.

B.When there is a market surplus.

C.When there is scarcity.

D.When it is difficult to enforce property rights.

E.When there is a market shortage

5.In which of the following market structures is price discrimination? possible?

??????a. perfect competition

??????b. monopoly

??????c. oligopoly

??????d. monopolistic competition

A.?b, c, and d only

B.?a, b,? c, and d

C.c and d only

D.b and c only

6. How do market economies ultimately determine what goods and services are? produced, how the goods and services will be? produced, and who will receive the goods and? services?

A.The government determines what goods and services are? produced, how to produce? them, and who will receive them.

B.Firms determine what goods and services are produced and how to produce? them, and markets determine who will receive them.

C.Consumers determine what goods and services are? produced, firms determine how to produce? them, and equity determines who will receive them.

D.Consumers determine what goods and services are? produced, firms determine how to produce? them, and markets determine who will receive them.

E.Firms determine what goods and services are? produced,technology determines how to produce? them, and consumers determine who will receive them.

7. For monopolistically competitive firms is it always likely in the? long-run to have? zero-economic profit?

Monopolistically competitive firms in the? long-run

A.may continue to earn profit by convincing consumers their products are differentconvincing consumers their products are different.

B.will not continue to earn profit because the cost of production will rise as new firms enter the market.

C.will not continue to earn profit because monopolistically competitive firms produce identical products.

D.will continue to earn profit due to barriers to new firms entering the market.

E.may continue to earn profit by instead beginning to produce a product identical to competitors.

8. In monopolistically competitive? markets, what is a factor under a? firm's control that determines whether it will be? successful?

A. Upper A firm's ability to differentiate its productA firm's ability to differentiate its product.

B.Consumer preferences.

C.Factors that affect all firms in a market.

D.Chance events.

E.Both a and b.

9. From the list? below, select the necessary condition in order to achieve successsful price discrimination.

A. The seller must possess market power.

B. Buyers must have identical inelastic demands.

C. Transactions costs must be zero.

D.The buyer must possess market power.??

10.Suppose Dell is currently selling 3,000,000 computers per year. However, managers at Dell are considering whether to increase production by 300,000 computers. One manager explains that after increasing production by this? amount, total profit would be? $100 million. Given this? information, should Dell increase production by 300,000 computers??

A.?Yes, because Dell would earn a profit.

B.Information about the additional cost incurred from producing 300,000additional computers is required to answer this question.

C.?No, because increasing production by 300,000 computers would decrease the price of computers.

D.Information about the additional revenue earned and the additional cost incurred from producing 300,000 additional computers is required to answer this question.

E. Information about the total revenue earned and the total cost incurred from producing 3,300,000 computers is required to answer this question.

11. The Majestic box office sells tickets for the same play at different? prices: a lower price to those who opt for the seats at the back of the theatre and a higher price for those who purchase seats in the? front, around the stage. Which of the following statements is? true?

A. This is an example of product differentiation not price discrimination.

B. The theatre practices first degree price discrimination by setting prices based on willingness to pay.

C. Charging two different prices is an effective way to avoid an excess demand for play? tickets; the higher price lowers quantity demanded to some extent.

D. Since the cost of producing the play does not change with the seating? configuration, this is evidence of price discrimination based on market segmentation.

ECN 104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Taipei Metro, Market Clearing, Profit Maximization

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