tailieunhanh - Tài liệu trung cấp môn Kinh tế vi mô bằng tiếng Anh - Phần 19

Tài liệu tham khảo Tài liệu trung cấp môn Kinh tế vi mô bằng tiếng Anh gồm 41 phần giúp sinh viên khoa kinh tế học tốt môn Kinh tế vi mô. Tài liệu này là phần 19 giới thiệu về " Công nghệ - Technology " | CHAPTER TECHNOLOGY In this chapter we begin our study of firm behavior. The first thing to do is to examine the constraints on a firm s behavior. When a firm makes choices it faces many constraints. These constraints are imposed by its customers by its competitors and by nature. In this chapter we re going to consider the latter source of constraints nature. Nature imposes the constraint that there are only certain feasible ways to produce outputs from inputs there are only certain kinds of technological choices that are possible. Here we will study how economists describe these technological constraints. If you understand consumer theory production theory will be very easy since the same tools are used. In fact production theory is much simpler than consumption theory because the output of a production process is generally observable whereas the output of consumption utility is not directly observable. Inputs and Outputs Inputs to production are called factors of production. Factors of production are often classified into broad categories such as land labor capital DESCRIBING TECHNOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS 323 and raw materials. It is pretty apparent what labor land and raw materials mean but capital may be a new concept. Capital goods are those inputs to production that are themselves produced goods. Basically capital goods are machines of one sort or another tractors buildings computers or whatever. Sometimes capital is used to describe the money used to start up or maintain a business. We will always use the term financial capital for this concept and use the term capital goods or physical capital for produced factors of production. We will usually want to think of inputs and outputs as being measured in flow units a certain amount of labor per week and a certain number of machine hours per week will produce a certain amount of output a week. We won t find it necessary to use the classifications given above very often. Most of what we want to describe about .