tailieunhanh - Ebook Managerial economics - Foundations of business analysis and strategy (12th edition): Part 2

(BQ) Part 2 book "Managerial economics" has contents: Government regulation of business; decisions under risk and uncertainty, advanced pricing techniques; strategic decision making in oligopoly markets; strategic decision making in oligopoly markets; managerial decisions in competitive markets,.and other contents. | Chapter 9 Production and Cost in the Long Run After reading this chapter, you will be able to: Graph a typical production isoquant and discuss the properties of isoquants. Construct isocost curves for a given level of expenditure on inputs. Apply optimization theory to find the optimal input combination. Construct the firm’s expansion path and show how it relates to the firm’s longrun cost structure. Calculate long-run total, average, and marginal costs from the firm’s expansion path. Explain how a variety of forces affects long-run costs: scale, scope, learning, and purchasing economies. Show the relation between long-run and short-run cost curves using long-run and short-run expansion paths. N o matter how a firm operates in the short run, its manager can always change things at some point in the future. Economists refer to this future period as the “long run.” Managers face a particularly important constraint on the way they can organize production in the short run: The usage of one or more inputs is fixed. Generally the most important type of fixed input is the physical capital used in production: machinery, tools, computer hardware, buildings for manufacturing, office space for administrative operations, facilities for storing inventory, and so on. In the long run, managers can choose to operate with whatever amounts and kinds of capital resources they wish. This is the essential feature of long-run analysis of production and cost. In the long run, managers are not stuck with too much or too little capital— or any fixed input for that matter. As you will see in this chapter, long-run 311 312  C H A P T E R 9   Production and Cost in the Long Run flexibility in resource usage usually creates an opportunity for firms to reduce their costs in the long run. Since a long-run analysis of production generates the “best-case” scenario for costs, managers cannot make tactical and strategic