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are the same. Similarly, many people over withhold on their taxes, essentially giving the government a free
loan until they file their tax returns, so that they are more likely to get money back than have to pay money on
their taxes.
Self-Check Questions
1. Jeremy is deeply in love with Jasmine. Jasmine lives where cell phone coverage is poor, so he can either
call her on the land-line phone for five cents per minute or he can drive to see her, at a round-trip cost of
$2 in gasoline money. He has a total of $10 per week to spend on staying in touch. To make his preferred
choice, Jeremy uses a handy utilimometer that measures his total utility from personal visits and from
phone minutes. Using the values in Table 6.6, figure out the points on Jeremy’s consumption choice
budget constraint (it may be helpful to do a sketch) and identify his utility-maximizing point.
Round Trips Total Utility Phone Minutes Total Utility
0 0 0 0
1 80 20 200
2 150 40 380
3 210 60 540
4 260 80 680
5 300 100 800
6 330 120 900
7 200 140 980
8 180 160 1040
9 160 180 1080
10 140 200 1100
TABLE 6.6
2. Take Jeremy’s total utility information in Exercise 6.1, and use the marginal utility approach to confirm
the choice of phone minutes and round trips that maximize Jeremy’s utility.
3. Explain all the reasons why a decrease in a product's price would lead to an increase in purchases.
4. As a college student you work at a part-time job, but your parents also send you a monthly “allowance.”
Suppose one month your parents forgot to send the check. Show graphically how your budget constraint is
affected. Assuming you only buy normal goods, what would happen to your purchases of goods?
Review Questions
5. Who determines how much utility an individual will receive from consuming a good?
6. Would you expect total utility to rise or fall with additional consumption of a good? Why?
7. Would you expect marginal utility to rise or fall with additional consumption of a good? Why?
8. Is it possible for total utility to increase while marginal utility diminishes? Explain.
6 • Self-Check Questions 155
9. If people do not have a complete mental picture of total utility for every level of consumption, how can they
find their utility-maximizing consumption choice?
10. What is the rule relating the ratio of marginal utility to prices of two goods at the optimal choice? Explain
why, if this rule does not hold, the choice cannot be utility-maximizing.
11. As a general rule, is it safe to assume that a change in the price of a good will always have its most
significant impact on the quantity demanded of that good, rather than on the quantity demanded of other
goods? Explain.
12. Why does a change in income cause a parallel shift in the budget constraint?
Critical Thinking Questions
13. Think back to a purchase that you made recently. How would you describe your thinking before you made
that purchase?
14. The rules of politics are not always the same as the rules of economics. In discussions of setting budgets
for government agencies, there is a strategy called “closing the Washington Monument.” When an agency
faces the unwelcome prospect of a budget cut, it may decide to close a high-visibility attraction enjoyed by
many people (like the Washington Monument). Explain in terms of diminishing marginal utility why the
Washington Monument strategy is so misleading. Hint: If you are really trying to make the best of a budget
cut, should you cut the items in your budget with the highest marginal utility or the lowest marginal
utility? Does the Washington Monument strategy cut the items with the highest marginal utility or the
lowest marginal utility?
15. Income effects depend on the income elasticity of demand for each good that you buy. If one of the goods
you buy has a negative income elasticity, that is, it is an inferior good, what must be true of the income
elasticity of the other good you buy?
Problems
16. Praxilla, who lived in ancient Greece, derives utility from reading poems and from eating cucumbers.
Praxilla gets 30 units of marginal utility from her first poem, 27 units of marginal utility from her second
poem, 24 units of marginal utility from her third poem, and so on, with marginal utility declining by three
units for each additional poem. Praxilla gets six units of marginal utility for each of her first three
cucumbers consumed, five units of marginal utility for each of her next three cucumbers consumed, four
units of marginal utility for each of the following three cucumbers consumed, and so on, with marginal
utility declining by one for every three cucumbers consumed. A poem costs three bronze coins but a
cucumber costs only one bronze coin. Praxilla has 18 bronze coins. Sketch Praxilla’s budget set between
poems and cucumbers, placing poems on the vertical axis and cucumbers on the horizontal axis. Start off
with the choice of zero poems and 18 cucumbers, and calculate the changes in marginal utility of moving
along the budget line to the next choice of one poem and 15 cucumbers. Using this step-by-step process
based on marginal utility, create a table and identify Praxilla’s utility-maximizing choice. Compare the
marginal utility of the two goods and the relative prices at the optimal choice to see if the expected
relationship holds. Hint: Label the table columns: 1) Choice, 2) Marginal Gain from More Poems, 3)
Marginal Loss from Fewer Cucumbers, 4) Overall Gain or Loss, 5) Is the previous choice optimal? Label the
table rows: 1) 0 Poems and 18 Cucumbers, 2) 1 Poem and 15 Cucumbers, 3) 2 Poems and 12 Cucumbers,
4) 3 Poems and 9 Cucumbers, 5) 4 Poems and 6 Cucumbers, 6) 5 Poems and 3 Cucumbers, 7) 6 Poems and
0 Cucumbers.
17. If a 10% decrease in the price of one product that you buy causes an 8% increase in quantity demanded of
that product, will another 10% decrease in the price cause another 8% increase (no more and no less) in
quantity demanded?
156 6 • Critical Thinking Questions
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FIGURE 7.1 Amazon is an American international electronic commerce company that sells books, among many
other things, shipping them directly to the consumer. Until recently there were no brick and mortar Amazon stores.
(Credit: modification of “Amazon Prime Delivery Van (50072389511)” by Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
2.0)
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
In this chapter, you will learn about:
• Explicit and Implicit Costs, and Accounting and Economic Profit
• Production in the Short Run
• Costs in the Short Run
• Production in the Long Run
• Costs in the Long Run
Introduction to Production, Costs, and Industry Structure
Amazon
In less than two decades, Amazon.com has transformed the way consumers sell, buy, and even read. Prior to
Amazon, independent bookstores with limited inventories in small retail locations primarily sold books. There were
exceptions, of course. Borders and Barnes & Noble offered larger stores in urban areas. In the last decade, however,
independent bookstores have mostly disappeared, Borders has gone out of business, and Barnes & Noble is
struggling. Online delivery and purchase of books has overtaken the more traditional business models. How has
7Production, Costs, and Industry
Structure
BRING IT HOME
Amazon changed the book selling industry? How has it managed to crush its competition?
A major reason for the giant retailer’s success is its production model and cost structure, which has enabled
Amazon to undercut the competitors' prices even when factoring in the cost of shipping. Read on to see how firms
great (like Amazon) and small (like your corner deli) determine what to sell, at what output, and price.
This chapter is the first of four chapters that explores the theory of the firm. This theory explains how firms
behave. What does that mean? Let’s define what we mean by the firm. A firm (or producer or business)
combines inputs of labor, capital, land, and raw or finished component materials to produce outputs. If the
firm is successful, the outputsare more valuable than the inputs. This activity of production goes beyond
manufacturing (i.e., making things). It includes any process or service that creates value, including
transportation, distribution, wholesale and retail sales.
Production involves a number of important decisions that define a firm's behavior. These decisions include,
but are not limited to:
• What product or products should the firm produce?
• How should the firm produce the products (i.e., what production process should the firm use)?
• How much output should the firm produce?
• What price should the firm charge for its products?
• How much labor should the firm employ?
The answers to these questions depend on the production and cost conditions facing each firm. That is the
subject of this chapter. The answers also depend on the market structure for the product(s) in question. Market
structure is a multidimensional concept that involves how competitive the industry is. We define it by
questions such as these:
• How much market power does each firm in the industry possess?
• How similar is each firm’s product to the products of other firms in the industry?
• How difficult is it for new firms to enter the industry?
• Do firms compete on the basis of price, advertising, or other product differences?
Figure 7.2 illustrates the range of different market structures, which we will explore in Perfect Competition,
Monopoly, and Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly.
FIGURE 7.2 The Spectrum of Competition Firms face different competitive situations. At one extreme—perfect
competition—many firms are all trying to sell identical products. At the other extreme—monopoly—only one firm is
selling the product, and this firm faces no competition. Monopolistic competition and oligopoly fall between the
extremes of perfect competition and monopoly. Monopolistic competition is a situation with many firms selling
similar, but not identical products. Oligopoly is a situation with few firms that sell identical or similar products.
Let's examine how firms determine their costs and desired profit levels. Then we will discuss the origins of
cost, both in the short and long run. Private enterprise, which can be private individual or group business
ownership, characterizes the U.S. economy. In the U.S. system, we have the option to organize private
businesses as sole proprietorships (one owner), partners (more than one owner), and corporations (legal
158 7 • Production, Costs, and Industry Structure
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entitles separate from the owners.
When people think of businesses, often corporate giants like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or General Motors come to
mind. However, firms come in all sizes, as Table 7.1 shows. The vast majority of American firms have fewer
than 20 employees. As of 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 5.7 million firms with employees in the U.S.
economy. Slightly less than half of all the workers in private firms are at the 17,000 large firms, meaning they
employ more than 500 workers. Another 35% of workers in the U.S. economy are at firms with fewer than 100
workers. These small-scale businesses include everything from dentists and lawyers to businesses that mow
lawns or clean houses. Table 7.1 does not include a separate category for the millions of small “non-employer”
businesses where a single owner or a few partners are not officially paid wages or a salary, but simply receive
whatever they can earn.
Number of Employees Firms (% of total firms) Number of Paid Employees (% of total employment)
Total 5,734,538 112.0 million
0–9 4,543,315 (79.2%) 12.3 million (11.0%)
10–19 617,089 (10.8%) 8.3 million (7.4%)
20–99 475,125 (8.3%) 18.6 million (16.6%)
100–499 81,773 (1.4%) 15.9 million (14.2%)
500 or more 17,236 (0.30%) 50.9 million (49.8%)
TABLE 7.1 Range in Size of U.S. Firms (Source: U.S. Census, 2010 www.census.gov)
7.1 Explicit and Implicit Costs, and Accounting and Economic Profit
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain the difference between explicit costs and implicit costs
• Understand the relationship between cost and revenue
Each business, regardless of size or complexity, tries to earn a profit:
Total revenue is the income the firm generates from selling its products. We calculate it by multiplying the
price of the product times the quantity of output sold:
We will see in the following chapters that revenue is a function of the demand for the firm’s products.
Total cost is what the firm pays for producing and selling its products. Recall that production involves the firm
converting inputs to outputs. Each of those inputs has a cost to the firm. The sum of all those costs is total cost.
We will learn in this chapter that short run costs are different from long run costs.
We can distinguish between two types of cost: explicit and implicit. Explicit costs are out-of-pocket costs, that
is, actual payments. Wages that a firm pays its employees or rent that a firm pays for its office are explicit costs.
Implicit costs are more subtle, but just as important. They represent the opportunity cost of using resources
that the firm already owns. Often for small businesses, they are resources that the owners contribute. For
example, working in the business while not earning a formal salary, or using the ground floor of a home as a
retail store are both implicit costs. (See the Work It Out feature for an extended example.)
7.1 • Explicit and Implicit Costs, and Accounting and Economic Profit 159
	Chapter 6 Consumer Choices
	Self-Check Questions
	Review Questions
	Critical Thinking Questions
	Problems
	Chapter 7 Production, Costs, and Industry Structure
	Introduction to Production, Costs, and Industry Structure
	7.1 Explicit and Implicit Costs, and Accounting and Economic Profit