8.1Perfect Competition and Why It Matters

Growing a crop may be more difficult to start than a babysitting or lawn mowing service, but growers face the same fierce competition. In the grand scale of world agriculture, farmers face competition from thousands of others because they sell an identical product. After all, winter wheat is winter wheat, but if they find it hard to make money with that crop, it is relatively easy for farmers to leave the marketplace for another crop. In this case, they do not sell the family farm, they switch crops. Take the case of the upper Midwest region of the United States—for many generations the area was called “King Wheat.” According to the United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, statistics by state, in 1997, 11.6 million acres of wheat and 780,000 acres of corn were planted in North Dakota. In the intervening 25 or so years has the mix of crops changed? Since it is relatively easy to switch crops, did farmers change what they planted in response to changes in relative crop prices? We will find out at chapter’s end. In the meantime, let's consider the topic of this chapter—the perfectly competitive market. This is a market in which entry and exit are relatively easy and competitors are “a dime a dozen.” Most businesses face two realities: no one is required to buy their products, and even customers who might want those products may buy from other businesses instead. Firms that operate in perfectly competitive markets face this reality. In this chapter, you will learn how such firms make decisions about how much to produce, how much profit they make, whether to stay in business or not, and many others. Industries differ from one another in terms of how many sellers there are in a specific market, how easy or difficult it is for a new firm to enter, and the type of products that they sell. Economists refer to this as an industry's market structure. In this chapter, we focus on perfect competition. However, in other chapters we will examine other industry types: Monopoly and Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly.

8.1 Perfect Competition and Why It Matters

LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the characteristics of a perfectly competitive market
• Discuss how perfectly competitive firms react in the short run and in the long run

Firms are in perfect competition when the following conditions occur: (1) many firms produce identical products; (2) many buyers are available to buy the product, and many sellers are available to sell the product; (3) sellers and buyers have all relevant information to make rational decisions about the product that they are buying and selling; and (4) firms can enter and leave the market without any restrictions—in other words, there is free entry and exit into and out of the market. A perfectly competitive firm is known as a price taker, because the pressure of competing firms forces it to accept the prevailing equilibrium price in the market. If a firm in a perfectly competitive market raises the price of its product by so much as a penny, it will lose all of its sales to competitors. When a wheat grower, as we discussed in the Bring It Home feature, wants to know the going price of wheat, they have to check on the computer or listen to the radio. Supply and demand in the entire market solely determine the market price, not the individual farmer. A perfectly competitive firm must be a very small player in the overall market, so that it can increase or decrease output without noticeably affecting the overall quantity supplied and price in the market. A perfectly competitive market is a hypothetical extreme; however, producers in a number of industries do face many competitor firms selling highly similar goods, in which case they must often act as price takers. Economists often use agricultural markets as an example. The same crops that different farmers grow are largely interchangeable. According to the United States Department of Agriculture monthly reports, in December 2021, U.S. corn farmers received an average of $5.47 per bushel. A corn farmer who attempted to sell at $6.00 per bushel would not have found any buyers. A perfectly competitive firm will not sell below the equilibrium price either. Why should they when they can sell all they want at the higher price? Other examples of agricultural markets that operate in close to perfectly competitive markets are small roadside produce markets and small organic farmers. LINK IT UP Visit this website (https://openstax.org/l/commodities) that reveals the current value of various commodities. This chapter examines how profit-seeking firms decide how much to produce in perfectly competitive markets. Such firms will analyze their costs as we discussed in the chapter on Production, Costs and Industry Structure. In the short run, the perfectly competitive firm will seek the quantity of output where profits are highest or, if profits are not possible, where losses are lowest. In the long run, positive economic profits will attract competition as other firms enter the market. Economic losses will cause firms to exit the market. Ultimately, perfectly competitive markets will attain long-run equilibrium when no new firms want to enter the market and existing firms do not want to leave the market, as economic profits have been driven down to zero.

8.2 How Perfectly Competitive Firms Make Output Decisions

LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Calculate profits by comparing total revenue and total cost
• Identify profits and losses with the average cost curve
• Explain the shutdown point
• Determine the price at which a firm should continue producing in the short run

A perfectly competitive firm has only one major decision to make—namely, what quantity to produce. To understand this, consider a different way of writing out the basic definition of profit: Since a perfectly competitive firm must accept the price for its output as determined by the product’s market demand and supply, it cannot choose the price it charges. This is already determined in the profit equation, and so the perfectly competitive firm can sell any number of units at exactly the same price. It implies that the firm faces a perfectly elastic demand curve for its product: buyers are willing to buy any number of units of output from the firm at the market price. When the perfectly competitive firm chooses what quantity to produce, then this quantity—along with the prices prevailing in the market for output and inputs—will determine the firm’s total revenue, total costs, and ultimately, level of profits.

Determining the Highest Profit by Comparing Total Revenue and Total Cost

A perfectly competitive firm can sell as large a quantity as it wishes, as long as it accepts the prevailing market price. The formula above shows that total revenue depends on the quantity sold and the price charged. If the firm sells a higher quantity of output, then total revenue will increase. If the market price of the product increases, then total revenue also increases whatever the quantity of output sold. As an example of how a perfectly competitive firm decides what quantity to produce, consider the case of a small farmer who produces raspberries and sells them frozen for $4 per pack. Sales of one pack of raspberries will bring in $4, two packs will be $8, three packs will be $12, and so on. If, for example, the price of frozen raspberries doubles to $8 per pack, then sales of one pack of raspberries will be $8, two packs will be $16, three packs will be $24, and so on. Table 8.1 shows total revenue and total costs for the raspberry farm; these data also appear in Figure 8.2. The horizontal axis shows the quantity of frozen raspberries produced in packs. The vertical axis shows both total revenue and total costs, measured in dollars. The total cost curve intersects with the vertical axis at a value that shows the level of fixed costs, and then slopes upward. All these cost curves follow the same