|
Natural Monopoly
A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production. In that case, it is very probable that a company (monopoly) or minimal number of companies (oligopoly) will form, providing all or most relevant products and/or services. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating large economies of scale about the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc. Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of market failure as early as the 19th century; John Stua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wealth Of Nations
''An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'', usually referred to by its shortened title ''The Wealth of Nations'', is a book by the Scottish people, Scottish economist and moral philosophy, moral philosopher Adam Smith; published on 9 March 1776, it offers one of the first accounts of what builds nations' wealth. It has become a fundamental work in classical economics, and been described as "the first formulation of a comprehensive system of political economy". Reflecting upon economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Smith introduced key concepts such as the division of labour, productivity, free markets and the role prices play in resource allocation. The book fundamentally shaped the field of economics and provided a theoretical foundation for free market capitalism and economic policies that prevailed in the 19th century. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the treatise offered a critical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Principles Of Political Economy
''Principles of Political Economy'' (1848) by John Stuart Mill was one of the most important economics or political economy textbooks of the mid-nineteenth century. It was revised until its seventh edition in 1871, shortly before Mill's death in 1873, and republished in numerous other editions. Beside discussing descriptive issues such as which nations tended to benefit more in a system of trade based on comparative advantage (Mill's answer: those with more elastic demands for other countries' goods), the work also discussed normative issues such as ideal systems of political economy, critiquing proposed systems such as communism and socialism. Along with '' A System of Logic'', ''Principles of Political Economy'' established Mill's reputation as a leading public intellectual. Mill's sympathetic attitude in this work and in other essays toward contemporary socialism, particularly Fourierism, earned him esteem from some of the working class as one of their intellectual champions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marginalist Revolution
Marginalism is a theory of economics that attempts to explain the discrepancy in the value of goods and services by reference to their secondary, or marginal, utility. It states that the reason why the price of diamonds is higher than that of water, for example, owes to the greater additional satisfaction of the diamonds over the water. Thus, while the water has greater total utility, the diamond has greater marginal utility. Although the central concept of marginalism is that of marginal utility, marginalists, following the lead of Alfred Marshall, drew upon the idea of marginal physical productivity in explanation of cost. The neoclassical tradition that emerged from British marginalism abandoned the concept of utility and gave marginal rates of substitution a more fundamental role in analysis. Marginalism is an integral part of mainstream economic theory. Main concepts Marginality For issues of marginality, constraints are conceptualized as a ''border'' or ''margin''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utilities
A public utility company (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure). Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation ranging from local community-based groups to statewide government monopolies. Public utilities are meant to supply goods and services that are considered essential; water, gas, electricity, telephone, waste disposal, and other communication systems represent much of the public utility market. The transmission lines used in the transportation of electricity, or natural gas pipelines, have natural monopoly characteristics. A monopoly can occur when it finds the best way to minimize its costs through economies of scale to the point where other companies cannot compete with it. For example, if many companies are already offering electricity, the additional installation of a power plant will only disadvantage the consumer as price ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telecommunications
Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of transmission may be divided into communication channels for multiplexing, allowing for a single medium to transmit several concurrent Session (computer science), communication sessions. Long-distance technologies invented during the 20th and 21st centuries generally use electric power, and include the electrical telegraph, telegraph, telephone, television, and radio. Early telecommunication networks used metal wires as the medium for transmitting signals. These networks were used for telegraphy and telephony for many decades. In the first decade of the 20th century, a revolution in wireless communication began with breakthroughs including those made in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Railways
Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport using wheeled vehicles running in tracks, which usually consist of two parallel steel rails. Rail transport is one of the two primary means of land transport, next to road transport. It is used for about 8% of passenger and freight transport globally, thanks to its energy efficiency and potentially high speed. Rolling stock on rails generally encounters lower frictional resistance than rubber-tyred road vehicles, allowing rail cars to be coupled into longer trains. Power is usually provided by diesel or electric locomotives. While railway transport is capital-intensive and less flexible than road transport, it can carry heavy loads of passengers and cargo with greater energy efficiency and safety. Precursors of railways driven by human or animal power have existed since antiquity, but modern rail transport began with the invention of the steam locomotive in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cost Curve
In economics, a cost curve is a graph of the costs of production as a function of total quantity produced. In a free market economy, productively efficient firms optimize their production process by minimizing cost consistent with each possible level of production, and the result is a cost curve. Profit-maximizing firms use cost curves to decide output quantities. There are various types of cost curves, all related to each other, including total and average cost curves; marginal ("for each additional unit") cost curves, which are equal to the differential of the total cost curves; and variable cost curves. Some are applicable to the short run, others to the long run. Notation There are standard acronyms for each cost concept, expressed in terms of the following descriptors: *SR = short run (costs spent on non-reusable materials e.g raw materials) *LR = long-run (cost spent on renewable materials e.g equipment) *A = average (per unit of output) *M = marginal (for an addition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subadditivity
In mathematics, subadditivity is a property of a function that states, roughly, that evaluating the function for the sum of two elements of the domain always returns something less than or equal to the sum of the function's values at each element. There are numerous examples of subadditive functions in various areas of mathematics, particularly norms and square roots. Additive maps are special cases of subadditive functions. Definitions A subadditive function is a function f \colon A \to B, having a domain ''A'' and an ordered codomain ''B'' that are both closed under addition, with the following property: \forall x, y \in A, f(x+y)\leq f(x)+f(y). An example is the square root function, having the non-negative real numbers as domain and codomain: since \forall x, y \geq 0 we have: \sqrt\leq \sqrt+\sqrt. A sequence \left \_ is called subadditive if it satisfies the inequality a_\leq a_n+a_m for all ''m'' and ''n''. This is a special case of subadditive function, if a sequ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Baumol
William Jack Baumol (February 26, 1922 – May 4, 2017) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He was a prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles. He is the namesake of the Baumol effect. Baumol wrote extensively about labor market and other economic factors that affect the economy. He also made significant contributions to the theory of entrepreneurship and the history of economic thought. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971, the American Philosophical Society in 1977, and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1987. Baumol was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2003, and Thomson Reuters cited him as a potential reci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Average Total Cost
In economics, average cost (AC) or unit cost is equal to total cost (TC) divided by the number of units of a good produced (the output Q): AC=\frac. Average cost is an important factor in determining how businesses will choose to price their products. Short-run average cost Short-run costs are those that vary with almost no time lagging. Labor cost and the cost of raw materials are short-run costs, but physical capital is not. An average cost curve can be plotted with cost on the vertical axis and quantity on the horizontal axis. Marginal costs are often also shown on these graphs, with marginal cost representing the cost of the last unit produced at each point; marginal costs in the short run are the slope of the variable cost curve (and hence the first derivative of variable cost). A typical average cost curve has a U-shape, because fixed costs are all incurred before any production takes place and marginal costs are typically increasing, because of diminishing margin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
