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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 state-owned enterprise is a commercial enterprise owned by a government entity in a capitalist market or mixed economy.Reasons for state ownership of commercial enterprises are that the enterprise in question is a natural monopoly or because the government is promoting economic development and industrialization.
Often, a natural monopoly is the outcome of an initial rivalry between several competitors. An early market entrant that takes advantage of the cost structure and can expand rapidly can exclude smaller companies from entering and can drive or buy out other companies. A natural monopoly suffers from the same inefficiencies as any other monopoly.
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 ...
Different economists have different views about what events are the sources of market failure. Mainstream economic analysis widely accepts that a market failure (relative to Pareto efficiency) can occur for three main reasons: if the market is "monopolised" or a small group of businesses hold significant market power, if production of the good or service results in an externality (external ...
Democratic capitalism, also referred to as market democracy, is a political and economic system that integrates resource allocation by marginal productivity (synonymous with free-market capitalism), with policies of resource allocation by social entitlement. [1] The policies which characterise the system are enacted by democratic governments. [1]
An easier way to solve this problem in a two-output context is the Ramsey condition. According to Ramsey, in order to minimize deadweight losses, one must increase prices to rigid and elastic demands/supplies in the same proportion, in relation to the prices that would be charged at the first-best solution (price equal to marginal cost).
Even Adam Smith, the canny Scot whose monumental book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), represents the beginning of modern economics or political economy-even he was so thrilled by the recognition of an order in the economic system that he proclaimed the mystical principle of the "invisible hand": that each individual in pursuing his own selfish ...