Managers, Profits, and

Markets

1
Overview
• Managerial economics addresses the larger economic and market forces
that shape both day-to-day business practices, as well as strategies for
sustaining the long-run profitability of firms.

• The economic way of thinking develops a systematic, logical approach to

understanding business decisions and strategies.

• Although profit maximization is the primary objective, the economic way

of thinking about business decisions and strategies provides all
managers with a powerful and indispensible set of tools and insights for
furthering the goals of their firms or organizations.

• Managerial economics applies the most useful concepts and theories

from two closely related areas of economics (microeconomics and
industrial organization) to create a systematic, logical way of analyzing
business practices and tactics designed to get the most profit, as well as
formulating strategies for sustaining or protecting these profits in the long
run 2
Overview
• Managerial economics helps you avoid some of the more common
mistakes that have led other managers to fail.

• I will draw your attention at various points along the way to a number
of common pitfalls, misconceptions, and even mistakes that real-
world managers would do well to avoid.

3
Outline
• 1.1 The Economic Way of Thinking about
Business Practices and Strategy
• 1.2 Measuring and Maximizing Economic
Profit
• 1.3 Separation of Ownership and Control
of the Firm
• 1.4 Market Structure and Managerial
Decision Making
4
1.1 The Economic Way of Thinking
about Business Practices and Strategy
• Economic Theory Simplifies Complexity
• The Roles of Microeconomics and
Industrial Organization

5
Economic Theory Simplifies Complexity
• Profitable solutions generally require that people understand how the
real world functions, which is often far too complex to comprehend
without making the simplifying assumptions used in theories.

• Theory allows people to gain insights into complicated problems using

simplifying assumptions to make sense out of confusion, to turn
complexity into relative simplicity.

• By abstracting away from the irrelevant, managers can use the

economic way of thinking about business problems to make predictions
and explanations that are valid in the real world, even though the theory
may ignore many of the actual characteristics of the real world.

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Economic Theory Simplifies Complexity
• Using economic theory is in many ways like using a road map.
• A road map abstracts away from nonessential items and concentrates
on what is relevant for the task at hand.
• The satellite view
– an exact representation of the real world;
– shows every road, tree, building, cow, and river
– While the satellite view is certainly fascinating to look at, its inclusion of every
geographic detail makes it inferior to the much simpler street view in its
ability to guide you to Memphis.
• The simpler street view
– better suited to guide you because it abstracts from reality by eliminating
irrelevant information and showing only the important roads between Dallas
and Memphis. As such, the (abstract) street view gives a much clearer
picture of how to get to Memphis than the (real-world) satellite view.

7
The Roles of Microeconomics and
Industrial Organization
• microeconomics
– The study of individual behavior of consumers,
business firms, and markets, and it contributes to
our understanding of business practices and
tactics.
• business practices or tactics
– Routine business decisions managers must
make to earn the greatest profit under the
prevailing market conditions facing the firm.
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The Roles of Microeconomics and
Industrial Organization
• industrial organization
– Branch of microeconomics focusing on the
behavior and structure of firms and industries.
• strategic decisions
– Business actions taken to alter market
conditions and behavior of rivals in ways that
increase and/or protect the strategic firm’s
profit.

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F I G U R E 1.1
Economic Forces That Promote Long-Run Profitability

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1.2 Measuring and Maximizing
Economic Profit
• Economic Cost of Using Resources
• Economic Profit versus Accounting Profit
• Maximizing the Value of the Firm
• The Equivalence of Value Maximization
and Profit Maximization
• Some Common Mistakes Managers Make

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Economic Cost of Using Resources
• opportunity cost
– What a firm’s owners give up to use resources to produce goods or
services.
– The opportunity cost reflects the current market value of the resource.
• market-supplied resources
– Resources owned by others and hired, rented, or leased in resource
markets.
– Eg: labor services of skilled and unskilled workers, raw materials
purchased in resource markets from commercial suppliers, and capital
equipment rented or leased from equipment suppliers.
• owner-supplied resources
– Resources owned and used by a firm.
– Eg: money provided to the business by its owners, time and labor
services provided by the firm’s owners, and any land, buildings, or
capital equipment owned and used by the firm.
• total economic cost
– Sum of opportunity costs of market-supplied resources plus
opportunity costs of owner-supplied resources. 12
Economic Cost of Using Resources
• explicit costs
– Monetary opportunity costs of using market-supplied resources.
– Eg:
• One of the resources Apple Inc. needs to manufacture its iMac computer is an
Intel Core i7 microprocessor chip. This chip is manufactured by Intel Corp.,
and Apple can purchase one for $310. Thus, Apple’s opportunity cost to obtain
the computer chip is $310, the monetary payment to the owner of the input.
– Explicit costs are indeed opportunity costs; specifically, it’s the amount of
money sacrificed by firm owners to get market supplied resources.

• implicit costs
– Nonmonetary opportunity costs of using owner-supplied resources.
– (1) the opportunity cost of cash provided to a firm by its owners, which
accountants refer to as equity capital;
– (2) the opportunity cost of using land or capital owned by the firm;
– (3) the opportunity cost of the owner’s time spent managing the firm or
working for the firm in some other capacity.
– Illustration 1. 2:The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Will It Close the GAAP
between Economic and Accounting Profit?

13
Principle
• Opportunity costs
– The opportunity cost of using resources is the amount the firm gives up
by using these resources.
– Opportunity costs can be either explicit costs or implicit costs.

• Explicit costs
– are the costs of using market-supplied resources, which are the
monetary payments to hire, rent, or lease resources owned by others.

• Implicit costs
– are the costs of using owner-supplied resources, which are the
greatest earnings forgone from using resources owned by the firm in
the firm’s own production process.

• Total economic cost

– is the sum of explicit and implicit costs. 14
F I G U R E 1. 2 Economic Cost of Using Resources

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Technical Problem 1

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Economic Profit versus Accounting Profit

• economic profit
– The difference between total revenue and total
economic cost.

• accounting profit
– The difference between total revenue and
explicit costs.

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Technical Problem 2

• 32（第 55／737 页）

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Maximizing the Value of the Firm
• value of a firm
– The price for which the firm can be sold, which equals the present value of
future profits.

– where is the economic profit expected in period t, r is the risk-adjusted

discount rate, and T is the number of years in the life of a firm.

• risk premium
– An increase in the discount rate to compensate investors for uncertainty
about future profits.

• Principle
– The larger (smaller) the risk associated with future profits, the higher
(lower) the risk-adjusted discount rate used to compute the value of the
firm, and the lower (higher) will be the value of the firm.

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Technical Problem 3

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The Equivalence of Value Maximization and Profit Maximization

• a manager maximizes the value of the firm by making

decisions that maximize expected profit in each period.
– Single-period profit maximization and maximizing the value of the
firm are usually equivalent means to the same end:
• Maximizing profit in each period will result in the maximum value of the
firm, and maximizing the value of the firm requires maximizing profit in
each period.
– If cost and revenue conditions in any period are independent of
decisions made in other time periods, a manager will maximize the
value of a firm (the present value of the firm) by making decisions
that maximize profit in every single time period.

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Today vs Future
Independent / dependent
• The equivalence of single-period profit maximization and maximizing
the value of the firm holds only when the revenue and cost
conditions in one time period are independent of revenue and costs
in future time periods.

• When today’s decisions affect profits in future time periods, price or

output decisions that maximize profit in each (single) time period will
not maximize the value of the firm.
– (1) a firm’s employees become more productive in future periods by
producing more output in earlier periods—a case of learning by doing
– (2) current production has the effect of increasing cost in the future—as
in extractive industries such as mining and oil production.

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Today vs Future
Independent / dependent
• If increasing current output has a positive effect on future revenue
and profit, a value-maximizing manager selects an output level that
is greater than the level that maximizes profit in a single time period.

• Alternatively, if current production has the effect of increasing cost in

the future, maximizing the value of the firm requires a lower current
output than maximizing single-period profit.

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Technical Problem 4

• 33（第 56／737 页）

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Some Common Mistakes Managers Make

• Never increase output simply to reduce average costs

• Pursuit of market share usually reduces profit
• Focusing on profit margin won’t maximize total profit
• Maximizing total revenue reduces profit
• Cost-plus pricing formulas don’t produce profit-maximizing
prices

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1.3 Separation of Ownership and
Control of the Firm
• The Principal–Agent Problem
• Corporate Control Mechanisms

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Background
• Business owners frequently choose to delegate control of their
businesses to a professional executive or senior manager who will
typically be assisted by additional subordinate managers, which creates
an executive management team that relieves the owners of management
duties.

• The decision to hire professional managers creates a separation between

business ownership and its management.

• principal–agent relationship
– Relationship formed when a business owner (the principal) enters an
agreement with an executive manager (the agent) whose job is to formulate
and implement tactical and strategic business decisions that will further the
objectives of the business owner (the principal).

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Background
• Separating ownership and control of a firm holds the potential to
significantly increase a firm’s value, especially when it replaces
“amateur” owner-managers with more experienced and talented
professional business decision makers.

• However, some or all of the potential gain to the owners from hiring
expert managers can be lost when owners cannot prevent
managers from behaving opportunistically by taking self-interested
actions that are harmful to the owners.

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The Principal–Agent Problem
• principal–agent problem
– A manager takes an action or makes a decision that
advances the interests of the manager but reduces
the value of the firm.
• A principal–agent problem requires the presence
of two conditions:
– (1) the manager’s objectives must be different from
those of the owner,
– (2) the owner must find it too costly or even
impossible to monitor the manager’s decisions to
block any decisions or behavior that would reduce the
firm’s value.
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Conflicting objectives between
owners and managers
• A self-interested owner naturally wants her
business run in a way that maximizes the value
of her business.
• A self-interested executive manager—if the
penalty is zero or small—will naturally wish to
take advantage of opportunities to make
decisions or take actions that will promote his
well-being even when these decisions also harm
the owner of the business.

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Problems with monitoring managers
• complete contract
– An employment contract that protects owners from every possible
deviation by managers from value-maximizing decisions.
• hidden actions
– Actions or decisions taken by managers that cannot be observed
by owners for any feasible amount of monitoring effort.
• moral hazard
– A situation in which managers take hidden actions that harm the
owners of the firm but further the interests of the managers.

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Corporate Control Mechanisms
• internal governance methods
– Rules of corporate governance give shareholders
rights that allow them to control managers directly
through specific corporate control measures and
indirectly through the corporation’s board of directors,
whose responsibility it is to monitor management.
– Shareholders themselves, and in partnership with the
board of directors, may choose from a variety of
mechanisms for controlling agency problems.
• external governance methods
– forces outside the firm can also motivate managers to
pursue maximization of the firm’s value.
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1.4 Market Structure and
Managerial Decision Making
• What Is a Market?
• Different Market Structures
• Globalization of Markets

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Market forces affect managerial decision

• Managers cannot expect to succeed without

understanding how market forces shape the firm’s ability
to earn profit.

• A particularly important aspect of managerial decision

making is the pricing decision.
• price-taker
– A firm that cannot set the price of the product it sells, since price
is determined strictly by the market forces of demand and supply.
• price-setting firm
– A firm that can raise its price without losing all of its sales.
• market power
– A firm’s ability to raise price without losing all sales.

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What Is a Market?
• market
– Any arrangement through which buyers and sellers exchange
anything of value.
– The arrangement may be a location and time, such as
• a commercial bank from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. on weekdays only,
• an agricultural produce market every first Tuesday of the month,
• a trading “pit” at a commodity exchange during trading hours,
• the parking lot of a stadium an hour before game time when ticket
scalpers sometimes show up to sell tickets to sporting events.
• a classified ad in a newspaper or a website on the Internet.

• transaction costs
– Costs of making a transaction happen, other than the price of the
good or service itself.
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Different Market Structures
• market structure
– Market characteristics that determine the economic
environment in which a firm operates.
• The number and size of the firms operating in
the market:
• The degree of product differentiation among
competing producers:
• The likelihood of new firms entering a market
when incumbent firms are earning economic
profits:

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perfect competition
• A large number of relatively small firms sell an undifferentiated
product in a market with no barriers to the entry of new firms.
• Managers of firms operating in perfectly competitive markets are
price-takers with no market power.
• At the price determined entirely by the market forces of demand and
supply, they decide how much to produce in order to maximize profit.
• In the absence of entry barriers, any economic profit earned at the
market-determined price will vanish as new firms enter and drive the
price down to the average cost of production.
• Many of the markets for agricultural goods and other commodities
traded on national and international exchanges closely match the
characteristics of perfect competition.

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monopoly market
• A single firm, protected by some kind of barrier to entry, produces a
product for which no close substitutes are available.
• A monopoly is a price-setting firm.
• The degree of market power enjoyed by the monopoly is determined
by the ability of consumers to find imperfect substitutes for the
monopolist’s product.
• The higher the price charged by the monopolist, the more willing are
consumers to buy other products.
• The existence of a barrier to entry allows a monopolist to raise its
price without concern that economic profit will attract new firms.
• As you will see in Chapter 12, examples of true monopolies are rare.

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monopolistic competition
• A large number of firms that are small relative to the total size of the market
produce differentiated products without the protection of barriers to entry.
• The only difference between perfect competition and monopolistic
competition is the product differentiation that gives monopolistic competitors
some degree of market power; they are price-setters rather than price-
takers.
• As in perfectly competitive markets, the absence of entry barriers ensures
that any economic profit will eventually be bid away by new entrants.
• The toothpaste market provides one example of monopolistic competition.
– The many brands and kinds of toothpaste are close, but not perfect, substitutes.
– Toothpaste manufacturers differentiate their toothpastes by using different
flavorings, abrasives, whiteners, fluoride levels, and other ingredients, along
with a substantial amount of advertising designed to create brand loyalty.

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oligopoly market
• A few firms produce most or all of the market output, so any one
firm’s pricing policy will have a significant effect on the sales of other
firms in the market.
• This interdependence of oligopoly firms means that actions by any
one firm in the market will have an effect on the sales and profits of
the other firms.
• As you will see in Chapter 13, the strategic decision making in
oligopoly markets is the most complex of all decision-making
situations.

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Globalization of Markets
• globalization of markets
– Economic integration of markets located in nations
around the world.
• Illustration 1. 5 Internet Spurs Globalization of Services
• The globalization journey of pigs一头猪的全球化旅程
http://open.163.com/movie/2013/4/2/3/M8SKFN5SP_M8
SKFPC23.html

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Globalization: Why?
• Growth of cross-border
trade and investment
– falling trade barriers
– falling financial barriers
– falling communications
costs

European monetary integration – Euro

Easier for people in one country to buy from other Euro
country more trade and investment
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http://open.163.com/movie/2016/6/D/H/MBPDKHO1J_MBPDKLBDH.html
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Globalization
• Buyers can obtain products from a wider range
of suppliers.
• Sellers can market their products to a wider set
of customers.

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Applied Problem 2

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Applied Problem 4

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Applied Problem 7

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Applied Problem 8

• 35（第 58／737 页）

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