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People queue up for soup and bread at relief tents in the aftermath of the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889. In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good."
In view of the scarce resources, the question of whether all available resources are fully utilized is an important one. A community should achieve maximum satisfaction by using the scarce resources in the best possible manner—not wasting resources or using them inefficiently. There are two types of employment of resources:
Hoarding resources can prevent or slow products or commodities from traveling through the economy. [4] Subsequently, this may cause the product or commodity to become scarce, causing the value of the resource to rise. A common intention of economic hoarding is to generate a profit by selling the product once the price has increased.
An economic system, or economic order, [1] is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society. It includes the combination of the various institutions , agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community.
A classic example of suboptimal resource allocation is that of a public good. In such cases, economists may attempt to find policies that avoid waste, either directly by government control, indirectly by regulation that induces market participants to act in a manner consistent with optimal welfare, or by creating " missing markets " to enable ...
Because productive resources are scarce, the resources must be allocated to various industries in just the right amounts, otherwise too much or too little output gets produced. [2] When drawing diagrams for businesses, allocative efficiency is satisfied if output is produced at the point where marginal cost is equal to average revenue.
The concept of supply and demand forms the theoretical basis of modern economics. In situations where a firm has market power, its decision on how much output to bring to market influences the market price, in violation of perfect competition. There, a more complicated model should be used; for example, an oligopoly or differentiated-product model.
Rationing is the controlled distribution of scarce resources, goods, services, [1] or an artificial restriction of demand. Rationing controls the size of the ration, which is one's allowed portion of the resources being distributed on a particular day or at a particular time. There are many forms of rationing, although rationing by price is ...