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Two different types of cost are important in microeconomics: marginal cost and fixed cost.The marginal cost is the cost to the company of serving one more customer. In an industry where a natural monopoly does not exist, the vast majority of industries, the marginal cost decreases with economies of scale, then increases as the company has growing pains (overworking its employees, bureaucracy ...
A natural monopoly earns negative profits if it sets price equals to marginal cost, so it must set prices for some or all of the products it sells to above marginal cost if it is to be viable without government subsidies. Ramsey pricing says to mark up most the goods with the least elastic (that is, least price-sensitive) demand or supply.
A natural monopoly is an organization that experiences increasing returns to scale over the relevant range of output and relatively high fixed costs. [70] A natural monopoly occurs where the average cost of production "declines throughout the relevant range of product demand".
The clearest example is a monopoly, where a single producer has complete control over supply and can extract a monopoly price. An oligopoly - a small number of producers - can also sustain an undersupply if no producers attempt to gain market share with lower prices at higher volume. Lack of supply competition can arise in many different ways:
A firm is a natural monopoly if it is able to serve the entire market demand at a lower cost than any combination of two or more smaller, more specialized firms. Or natural obstacles, such as the sole ownership of natural resources, De beers was a monopoly in the diamond industry for years. Monopsony, when there is only a single buyer in a ...
An oligopsony (from Greek ὀλίγοι (oligoi) "few" and ὀψωνία (opsōnia) "purchase") is a market form in which the number of buyers is small while the number of sellers in theory could be large.
The total cost curve, if non-linear, can represent increasing and diminishing marginal returns.. The short-run total cost (SRTC) and long-run total cost (LRTC) curves are increasing in the quantity of output produced because producing more output requires more labor usage in both the short and long runs, and because in the long run producing more output involves using more of the physical ...
[1] [2] A monopoly occurs when a firm lacks any viable competition and is the sole producer of the industry's product. [1] [2] Because a monopoly faces no competition, it has absolute market power and can set a price above the firm's marginal cost. [1] [2] The monopoly ensures a monopoly price exists when it establishes the quantity of the ...