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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 ...
Suppose there are two potential producers of good X, Firm A, and Firm B. Firm A has no fixed costs and constant marginal cost equal to >. Firm B also has no fixed costs, and has constant marginal cost equal to g c {\displaystyle gc} , where g > 1 {\displaystyle g>1} (so that Firm B's marginal cost is greater than Firm A's).
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".
But, as a natural monopoly, PG&E and other investor-owned utilities do not have to be for-profit entities. In fact, around California, there are over 40 publicly owned electric utilities that are ...
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 ...
The Ramsey problem, or Ramsey pricing, or Ramsey–Boiteux pricing, is a second-best policy problem concerning what prices a public monopoly should charge for the various products it sells in order to maximize social welfare (the sum of producer and consumer surplus) while earning enough revenue to cover its fixed costs.
They can play off one supplier against another, thus lowering their costs. They can also dictate exact specifications to suppliers, for delivery schedules, quality, and (in the case of agricultural products) crop varieties. They also pass off much of the risks of overproduction, natural losses, and variations in cyclical demand to the suppliers.
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 ...