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The purpose of calculating economic profits (and thus, opportunity costs) is to aid in better business decision-making through the inclusion of opportunity costs. In this way, a business can evaluate whether its decision and the allocation of its resources is cost-effective or not and whether resources should be reallocated.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
In economics a trade-off is expressed in terms of the opportunity cost of a particular choice, which is the loss of the most preferred alternative given up. [2] A tradeoff, then, involves a sacrifice that must be made to obtain a certain product, service, or experience, rather than others that could be made or obtained using the same required resources.
In the context of a PPF, opportunity cost is directly related to the shape of the curve (see below). If the shape of the PPF curve is a straight-line, the opportunity cost is constant as the production of different goods is changing. But, opportunity cost usually will vary depending on the start and end points.
[1] Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. [2] The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself". [3]
It begins with the premise that resources are scarce and that it is necessary to choose between competing alternatives. That is, economics deals with tradeoffs. With scarcity, choosing one alternative implies forgoing another alternative—the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost expresses an implicit relationship between competing alternatives.
The Williamson tradeoff model is a theoretical model in the economics of industrial organization which emphasizes the tradeoff associated with horizontal mergers between gains resulting from lower costs of production and the losses associated with higher prices due to greater degree of monopoly power.
Hoarding in economics refers to the concept of purchasing and storing a large amount of a particular product, creating scarcity of that product, and ultimately driving the price of that product up. Commonly hoarded products include assets such as money, gold and public securities , [ 1 ] as well as vital goods such as fuel and medicine. [ 2 ]