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Allocative efficiency is a state of the economy in which production is aligned with the preferences of consumers and producers; in particular, the set of outputs is chosen so as to maximize the social welfare of society. [1] This is achieved if every produced good or service has a marginal benefit equal to the marginal cost of production.
Productive efficiency: no additional output of one good can be obtained without decreasing the output of another good, and production proceeds at the lowest possible average total cost. These definitions are not equivalent: a market or other economic system may be allocatively but not productively efficient, or productively but not allocatively ...
That is, as an economy specializes more and more into one product (such as moving from point B to point D), the opportunity cost of producing that product increases, because we are using more and more resources that are less efficient in producing it. With increasing production of butter, workers from the gun industry will move to it.
Perfect competition provides both allocative efficiency and productive efficiency: Such markets are allocatively efficient, as output will always occur where marginal cost is equal to average revenue i.e. price (MC = AR).
The production possibilities frontier (PPF) for guns versus butter. Points like X that are outside the PPF are impossible to achieve. Points such as B, C, and D illustrate the trade-off between guns and butter: at these levels of production, producing more of one requires producing less of the other. Points located along the PPF curve represent ...
An example PPF: points B, C and D are all productively efficient, but an economy at A would not be, because D involves more production of both goods. Point X cannot be achieved. Productive efficiency occurs under competitive equilibrium at the minimum of average total cost for each good, such as the one shown here.
A price signal is information conveyed to consumers and producers, via the prices offered or requested for, and the amount requested or offered of a product or service, which provides a signal to increase or decrease quantity supplied or quantity demanded.
Average-cost pricing does also have some disadvantages. By setting price equal to the intersection of the demand curve and the average total cost curve, the firm's output is allocatively inefficient as the price is less than the marginal cost (which is the output quantity for a perfectly competitive and allocatively efficient market).