An electronics firm is currently manufacturing an item that has a variable cost of $0.50 per unit and a selling price of $1.00 per unit. Fixed costs are$14,000 per month. Current volume is 30,000 units per month. The firm wants to improve the product quality by adding a new piece of equipment at an additional fixed cost of $6,000 a month. Variable cost would increase to $0.60 a unit but volume should jump to 50,000 units a month due to improved productivity. Although the new product is of a higher quality, the firm intends to stay with the selling price of $1.00 per unit (for competitive purposes). (a) Should the firm buy the new equipment? (b) The firm is now considering stepping the new volume to 45,000 units a month to produce even better quality products and increase the selling price to $1.10 a unit. Under these circumstances, should the company buy the new equipment and increase the selling price?

Acompany determined that the budgeted cost of producing a product is $30 per unit. on june 1, there were 80,000 units on hand, the sales department budgeted sales of 300,000 units in june, and the company desires to have 120,000 units on hand on june 30. the budgeted cost of goods sold for june would be

Consider the local telephone company, a natural monopoly. the following graph shows the monthly demand curve for phone services and the company’s marginal revenue (mr), marginal cost (mc), and average total cost (atc) curves. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 price (dollars per subscription) quantity (thousands of subscriptions) d mr mc atc 8, 60 suppose that the government has decided not to regulate this industry, and the firm is free to maximize profits, without constraints. complete the first row of the following table. pricing mechanism short run long-run decision quantity price profit (subscriptions) (dollars per subscription) profit maximization marginal-cost pricing average-cost pricing suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to marginal cost. complete the second row of the previous table. suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to average total cost. complete the third row of the previous table. under average-cost pricing, the government will raise the price of output whenever a firm’s costs increase, and lower the price whenever a firm’s costs decrease. over time, under the average-cost pricing policy, what will the local telephone company most likely do

Suppose that two firms produce differentiated products and compete in prices. as in class, the two firms are located at two ends of a line one mile apart. consumers are evenly distributed along the line. the firms have identical marginal cost, $60. firm b produces a product with value $110 to consumers.firm a (located at 0 on the unit line) produces a higher quality product with value $120 to consumers. the cost of travel are directly related to the distance a consumer travels to purchase a good. if a consumerhas to travel a mile to purchase a good, the incur a cost of $20. if they have to travel x fraction of a mile, they incur a cost of $20x. (a) write down the expressions for how much a consumer at location d would value the products sold by firms a and b, if they set prices p_{a} and p_{b} ? (b) based on your expressions in (a), how much will be demanded from each firm if prices p_{a} and p_{b} are set? (c) what are the nash equilibrium prices?