What follows is a speculative discourse on the economic analysis of competition. It’s a discourse that I believe I made in an earlier post – but, if I did make it, I cannot now find it. So, for the record I make it again. It’s wonky, it might be incorrect in its details, and it’s below the fold.
Imagining an Alternative Model of Perfect Competition
Economic competition, from the standpoint of each supplier, is an economic reality with which he or she must deal in order to achieve the ultimate goal of each supplier qua supplier – namely, to increase as much as possible his or her firm’s net present value. Absent special privileges, each supplier in a competitive market attempts to achieve this goal by adjusting its operations on several margins. Cutting prices to attract more buyers is only one such competitive move. Improving product quality is another. Lowering per-unit costs of production and distribution is yet another.
In neoclassical mainstream economics, however, price competition is treated as if it is the only, or, certainly, the paramount form of competition. This obsession with price competition is unwarranted. While I stand second to no one in my appreciation of the indisputably central and vital role that market-determined prices play in a market economy, it is an error to suppose that price competition is the only, the paramount, or exclusively the best form of competition.
Of course it’s true that consumers want to pay as low a price as possible for a unit of any given good or service. For the very same reason, consumers want to get as much quality as possible in that good or service for any given price at which that good or service is available for sale.
When consumers act to “maximize their utility” or to “get good bargains” – call it what you will – prices are not all that matter to them. If prices were all that matter, then even billionaires would eat only ramen-noodle dishes, wear only cheap second-hand clothing, and don only Timexes and never Rolexes.
So suppose that economists had formulated the theory of perfect competition differently. Suppose that, instead of assuming exogenously given and fixed goods and services (of given qualities) in order to see how competition affects the prices of goods and services, economists had assumed that the prices of different types of goods and services are exogenously given and fixed in order to see how competition affects the types and quality of goods and services made available on market.
In this Alternative Model of Perfect Competition, economists would explain that, in a ‘perfectly competitive’ industry, each firm is a “product-quality taker.” At each moment in time, each firm could sell as many units per period as it wished without improving its product’s quality, and would lose all sales if it lowered its product quality by even the tiniest amount. As in the actual, familiar model of perfect competition, each firm’s only “choice” in the Alternative Model is the quantity to produce. Each firm would produce that quantity of output at which marginal cost equals price.
Remember, in this Alternative Model of Perfect Competition, price never changes. As with product quality in the actual, standard model of perfect competition, in this Alternative Model, price throughout remains exogenously given and fixed....MORE
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Questions Americans Want Answered: "What If Product Quality Rather Than Price Had Been Economists’ Chief Object of Explanation?"
From Cafe Hayek:
