In: Economics
1. Suppose a secondary good is supplied in competitive market. A monopolist supplies the market for the primary good. The demand for the primary good is unitary (either 0 or 1), the marginal cost of producing the primary good is zero. The market for the secondary good has two types of consumers: those in proportion λ have inverse demand schedule ?? = 5 − 1 2??, while the remaining 1 − λ have inverse demand ?? = 10 − ??. Normalize the total number of consumers to 1, and let c = 2 be the constant marginal cost for the secondary good. a) Explain why there might be an incentive for tying. b) Assume the monopolist is allowed to tying the products. What is the optimal price of the primary good when only high demand consumers purchase the good? What is the price of the secondary good? c) If λ=.5, what is the price of optimal price for the primary and for the secondary price? Does the monopolist supply both types of consumers?
a)
Primary goods
Primary products are
goods that are available from cultivating raw materials
without a producing process. Significant primary product
industries include agriculture, fishing, mining, and
forestry.
Often developing countries
have a comparative advantage in producing primary products. This is
because many developing countries (e.g. in Africa are rich in
resources, but poor in capital and education). Therefore, they
will mine and export primary products to realize
revenue.
Low-income
elasticity of demand
As income increases, demand for several food stuffs doesn’t really increase. As incomes increases, demand for tea, coffee and sugar don’t increase that much. Therefore, countries who believe primary products may have lower income growth than countries producing manufactured goods, with a better income elasticity of demand.
Finite
Resources
Primary products like metals, oil and gas are finite resources. Therefore, there's always a danger that when these resources are exhausted, the economy will lose its main export revenue.
Price
Volatility
The price of primary
products tends to be far more volatile. e.g. they can be
influenced by weather and speculation. These prices changes can be
damaging to countries. If prices fall and demand is price
inelastic, then producers can leave of business and therefore the
country loses its main sort of export revenue.
Lack of investment
in education
Production of primary
products is usually unskilled labor (mining, agriculture).
Therefore an economy that speciales in primary products may fail to
possess enough incentives to take a positioning labor productivity
which helps the long-term performance of the economy.
Secondary goods
In macroeconomics, the
secondary sector of the economy is an economic sector within
the three-sector theory which describes the role of producing. It
encompasses the industries which produce a finished, usable product
or are involved in construction.
This sector generally takes
the output of the first sector (i.e. raw materials) and
creates finished goods suitable to be used by other businesses, for
export, or purchasable to domestic consumers (via distribution
through the tertiary sector).
Many of those
industries consume large quantities of energy and need factories
and machinery; they' often classified as light or heavy supported
such quantities. They also produce waste materials and waste heat
which will cause environmental problems or cause pollution (see
negative externalities). Examples include textile production, car
manufacturing, and handicraft.
Manufacturing is a
crucial activity in promoting economic process and
development. Nations that export manufactured products tend to get
higher marginal GDP growth which supports higher incomes and
marginal tax income needed to fund quality-of-life initiatives like
health care and infrastructure in the economy. The field is a
crucial source for engineering job opportunities. Among developed
countries, it's a crucial source of well-paying jobs for the center
class to facilitate greater social mobility for successive
generations on the economy. Currently, an estimated 20% of the
labor pool within the us is involved within the secondary
industry.
The secondary sector
depends on the first sector for the raw materials necessary
for production. Countries that believe agriculture and other raw
materials i.e. (primary sector), grow slowly and remain
under-developed or developing economies. The value addition after
the processing of products creates for higher profitability, which
accounts for the expansion of developed economies.
Price discrimination
Price discrimination happens when a firm charges a special price to different groups of consumers for a uniform good or service, for reasons not related to costs of supply.
• Charging different prices
for similar goods is not pure price discrimination.
• Product differentiation
gives a supplier greater control over price and the potential to
charge consumers a premium price arising from differences in the
quality or performance of a product.
Differences in price elasticity of demand:
There must be a special price elasticity of demand for every group of consumers. The firm is then ready to charge a better price to the group with a more price inelastic demand and a lower cost to the group with a more elastic demand. By adopting such a technique , the firm can increase total revenue and profits (i.e. achieve a higher level of producer surplus). To profit maximise, the firm will seek to line marginal revenue = to incremental cost in each separate market.
b)
Barriers to
stopconsumers switching from one supplier to another: The
firm must be ready to prevent "consumer switching" – i.e. consumers
who have purchased a product at a lower cost are ready to re-sell
it to those consumers who would have otherwise paid the expensive
price.
This can be wiped
out variety of the way , – and is perhaps easier to realize
with the supply of a singular service like a haircut, dental
treatment or a consultation with a doctor instead of with the
exchange of tangible goods like a meal during a restaurant.
• Switching might be
prevented by selling a product to consumers at unique moments in
time – for example with the use of airline tickets for a specific
flight that cannot be resold under any circumstances or cheaper
rail tickets that are valid for a selectedrail
service.
• Software businesses often
offer heavy price discounts for educational users providing they
give an academic email address
• Students may be required
to show proof of identification using secure ID cards
Price discrimination is
easier when there are separate and distinct marketsfor a firm's
products and when price elasticity of demand varies from one group
of consumers to another
Perfect Price
Discrimination is charging regardless of themarket will
bear
• Sometimes known as
optimal pricing, with perfect price discrimination, the firm
separates the market into each individual consumer and charges them
the price they are willing and able to pay
• If successful, the firm
can extract the entire consumer surplus that lies underneath the
demand curve and turn it into extra revenue or producer
surplus.
• This is hard to achieve
unless a business has full information on every consumer's
individual preferences and willingness to pay. The transactions
costs involved findout through marketing research what each
buyer is ready to pay is that the main barrier to a business's
engaging during this sort of price discrimination.
• If the monopolist can
perfectly segment the market, then the average revenue curve
becomes the marginal revenue curve.
• A monopolist will
continue to sell extra units as long as the extra revenue exceeds
the marginal cost of production.
In reality, most suppliers
and consumers like better towork with tariffs and menus from
which trade can happen instead of having to barter a price for
every unit bought and sold.
When profit-maximizing
firms in perfectly competitive markets combine with
utility-maximizing consumers, something remarkable happens—the
resulting quantities of outputs of productsand services
demonstrate both productive and allocative efficiency.
Productive
efficiency means producing without waste in
order that the selection is on the assembly possibility frontier.
In the end of the day during a perfectly competitive market—because
of the method of entry and exit—the price within the market is
adequate to the minimum of the long-run monetary value curve. In
other words, goods are being produced and sold at rock bottom
possible monetary value.
Allocative efficiency
meansamong the points on the assembly possibility frontier,
the purpose that's chosen is socially preferred—at least during a
particular and specific sense. In a perfectly competitive market,
price is adequate to the incremental cost of production. Think
about the worth that's purchased an honest as a measure of the
social benefit received for that good; in any
case. willingness to pay conveys what the good is
worth to a buyer. Then believe the incremental cost of
manufacturing the great as representing not just the value for the
firm but, more broadly, because the social cost of manufacturing
that good.
When perfectly competitive
firms follow the rule that profits are maximized by producing at
the numberwhere price is adequate to incremental cost.
They're ensuring that the social benefits received from producing
an honest are in line with the social costs of production.
Let's know their an
example to more thoroughly explore what is meant by allocative
efficiency. Let's begin by assuming that the marketplace for
wholesale flowers is perfectly competitive, Now, consider what it
might mean if firms there in market produced a lesser quantity of
flowers. At a lesser quantity, marginal costs would not yet have
increased as much, so the price would exceed marginal cost.
In this situation, the
benefit to society as an entire of manufacturing additional
goods—as measured by the willingness of consumers to buy marginal
units of a good—would be higher than the value of the inputs of
labor and physical capital needed to supply the marginal good. In
other words, the gains to society as an entire from producing
additional marginal units would be greater than the prices .
On the oppositehand,
consider what it might mean if—compared to the extent of output at
the allocatively efficient choice.
They also make sure that the advantages to consumers of what
they're buying—as measured by the worth they'rewilling to pay—is
adequate to the prices to society of producing the marginal
units—as measured by the marginal costs the firm must pay. Thus,
allocative efficiency holds.
When we say that a
wonderfullycompetitive market within the end of the day will
feature both productive and allocative efficiency, we'd like to
recollect that economists are using the concept of efficiency
during a particular and specific sense, not as a synonym for
“desirable in every way”. For one thing, consumers’ ability to pay
reflects the income distribution during a particular society. Thus,
a homeless may haven't any ability to buy housing because they need
insufficient income.
Perfect
competition,
It may be a hypothetical benchmark. For market structures
such as monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly—which are
more frequently observed in the real world than perfect
competition—firms will not always produce at the minimum of average
cost, nor will they always set price adequate to incremental cost .
Thus, these other competitive situations won't produce productive
and allocative efficiency.
Moreover, real-world
markets include many issues that are assumed away within the
model of perfect competition, including pollution, inventions of
latest technology, poverty—which may make some people unable to pay
for basic necessities of life—government programs like national
defense or education, discrimination parturient markets, and buyers
and sellers who must affect imperfect and unclear
information.
The theoretical efficiency
of perfect competition does, however, provide a useful benchmark
for comparing the problems that arise from these real-world
problems.
If perfect competition may
be a market where firms haven't any market power and that
they simply answer the market value , monopoly may be a market with
no competition in the least , and firms have a great deal of market
power. In the case of monopoly, one firm produces all of the output
during a market. Since a monopoly faces no significant competition,
it can charge any price it wishes, subject to the demand curve.
While a monopoly, by definition, refers to one firm, in practice
people often use the term to explain a market during which one firm
merely features a very high market share. This tends to be the
definition that the U.S. Department of Justice uses.
Even though there are only
a few true monopolies alive , we do affect a number of those
few a day , often without realizing it: The U.S. Postal Service,
your electric, and garbage pickup companies are a couple of
examples. Some new drugs are produced by just one pharmaceutical
firm—and no close substitutes for that drug may exist.
From the mid-1990s until
2004, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted the Microsoft
Corporation for including Internet Explorer because the
default browser with its OS . The Justice Department’s argument was
that, since Microsoft possessed a particularly high market share
within the industry for operating systems, the inclusion of a free
browser constituted unfair competition to other browsers, such as
Netscape Navigator. Since nearly everyone was using Windows,
including Internet Explorer eliminated the incentive for consumers
to explore other browsers and made it impossible for competitors to
gain a foothold in the market. In 2013, the Windows system ran on
quite90% of the foremost commonly sold personal computers. In 2015,
a U.S. federal court tossed out antitrust charges that Google had
an agreement with mobile device makers to line Google because the
default program .
This chapter begins by
describing how monopolies are shielded from competition,
including laws that prohibit competition, technological advantages,
and certain configurations of demand and provide . It then
discusses how a monopoly will choose its profit-maximizing quantity
to supply and what price to charge. While a monopoly must worry
about whether consumers will purchase its products or spend their
money on something altogether different, the monopolist needn't
worry about the actions of other competing firms producing its
products. As a result, a monopoly isn't a price taker sort of a
perfectly competitive firm, but instead exercises some power to
settle on its market value .
Because of the
shortage of competition, monopolies tend to earn significant
economic profits. These profits should attract vigorous competition
as we described in perfect competition, and yet, due to one
particular characteristic of monopoly, they are doing not. Barriers
to entry are the legal, technological, or economic process that
discourage or prevent potential competitors from entering a market.
Barriers to entry can range from the straightforward and simply
surmountable, like the value of renting retail space, to the
extremely restrictive. For example, there are a finite number of
radio frequencies available for broadcasting. Once an entrepreneur
or firm has purchased the rights to all or any of them, no new
competitors can enter the market.
In some cases, barriers to
entry may cause monopoly. In other cases, they'll limit
competition to a couple of firms. Barriers may block entry albeit
the firm or firms currently within the market are earning profits.
Thus, in markets with significant barriers to entry, it's not
necessarily true that abnormally high profits will attract new
firms, whichthis entry of latest firms will eventually cause the
worth to say no in order that surviving firms earn only a
traditionallevel of profit within the end of the day .
There are two sorts
of monopoly, supported the kinds of barriers to entry they
exploit. One is natural monopoly, where the barriers to entry are
something aside from legal prohibition. The other is legal
monopoly, where laws prohibit (or severely limit)
competition.
Legal Monopoly
Franchising and
Government Licensing
For some products, the
govt erects barriers to entry by prohibiting or limiting
competition. Under U.S. law, no organization but the U.S. Postal
Service is legally allowed to deliver first-class mail. Many states
or cities have laws or regulations that allow households a choice
of just one power company , one waterworks , and one company to
select up the rubbish . Most legal monopolies are
utilities—products necessary for everyday life—that are socially
beneficial. As a consequence, the govt allows producers to become
regulated monopolies, to insure that customers have access to an
appropriate amount of those products or services. Additionally,
legal monopolies are often subject to economies of scale, so it is
sensible to permit just one provider.
The government can
also require a license to interact in certain trades. This
can range from being a teamster , cutting hair, being an engineer,
flying a plane, selling financial instrument, to even giving a
tour. We see an increase in price and a decrease in quantity. The
same logic holds here. When the availability of labor is
restricted, it causes the worth of labor, or the wage, to extend .
As we'll see, this creates an “insider-outsider” situation where
people who have a license want to make sure that a license is
usually needed to stay new competition out of the market and to
keep wages higher.
c) Monopolist supply the both the customers
Types of Price
Discrimination
There are three sorts
of price discrimination: first-degree or perfect price
discrimination, second-degree, and third-degree. These degrees of
price discrimination also are referred to as personalized pricing
(1st-degree pricing), product versioning or menu pricing
(2nd-degree pricing), and group pricing (3rd-degree pricing).
First-degree Price
Discrimination
First-degree
discrimination, or perfect price discrimination, occurs when a
business charges the utmost possible price for every unit
consumed. Because prices vary among units, the firm captures all
available consumer surplus for itself, or the economic surplus.
Many industries involving client services practice first-degree
price discrimination, where a corporation charges a special price
for each good or service sold.
Second-degree Price
Discrimination
Second-degree price
discrimination occurs when a corporation charges a special
price for various quantities consumed, like quantity discounts on
bulk purchases.
Third-degree Price
Discrimination
Third-degree price
discrimination occurs when a corporation charges a special
price to different consumer groups. For example, a theater may
divide moviegoers into seniors, adults, and youngsters , each
paying a special price when seeing an equivalent movie. This
discrimination is the most common.
Examples of Price
Discrimination
Many industries,
like the airline industry, the humanities and show business
, and therefore the pharmaceutical industry, use price
discrimination strategies. Examples of price discrimination include
issuing coupons, applying specific discounts (e.g., age discounts),
and creating loyalty programs. One example of price discrimination
are often seen within the airline industry. Consumers buying
airline tickets several months beforehand typically pay but
consumers purchasing at the eleventh hour . When demand for a
specific flight is high, airlines raise ticket prices in
response.
By contrast, when tickets
for a flight aren't selling well, the airline reduces the
value of obtainable tickets to undertake to get sales. Because many
passengers prefer flying home late on Sunday, those flights tend to
be costlier than flights leaving early Sunday morning. Airline
passengers typically pay more for extra legroom too.
Menu pricing under
imperfect competition. Competitive quality-based menu pricing
.Sketch of the model . 2 firms located at the extremes of Hotelling
line .Each firm can sell high-end & low-end versions of some
good .Mass 1 of consumers uniformly distributed on the road
. Heterogeneous in terms of transportation costs .Heterogeneous in
terms of valuation of quality. Multiple equilibria in pricing game
→ Coexistence of. ‘Discriminatory’ equilibrium: both firms offer 2
versions, consumers self-select (high types buy high-end version,
low types buy low-end version). ‘Non-discriminatory’ equilibrium:
both firms produce only the high-end version.