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Выполнила: соискатель от кафедры ММИТЭ,

Шибанова Елена Владимировна

Специальность 351400

«Прикладная информатика в экономике»

Научный руководитель: доцент, к. ф.-м.н.

Смирнов Юрий Николаевич

Проверила: старший преподаватель

Ишмурадова Альфия Мухтаровна

г. Набережные Челны

2003 год

Содержание:

Содержание: 2

1. Текст для перевода на языке-оригинале 3

2. Перевод текста с языка оригинала 10

3. Словарь экономических терминов по специальности 18

4. Сочинение «Моя будущая научная работа» 35

5. Библиография 36

1. Текст для перевода на языке-оригинале

The firm and its objectives

We have now discussed the data which the firm needs for its decision-

making—the demand for its products and the cost of supplying them. But,

even with this information, in order to determine what decisions are

optimal it is still necessary to find out the businessman's aims. The

decision which best serves one set of goals will not usually be appropriate

for some other set of aims.

1. Alternative Objectives of the Firm

There is no simple method for determining the goals of the firm (or of

its executives). One thing, however, is clear. Very often the last person

to ask about any individual's motivation is the person himself (as the

psychoanalysts have so clearly shown). In fact, it is common experience

when interviewing executives to find that they will agree to every

plausible goal about which they are asked. They say they want to maximize

sales and also to maximize profits; that they wish, in the bargain, to

minimize costs; and so on. Unfortunately, it is normally impossible to

serve all of such a multiplicity of goals at once.

For example, suppose an advertising outlay of half a million dollars

minimizes unit costs, an outlay of 1.2 million maximizes total profits,

whereas an outlay of 1.8 million maximizes the firm's sales volume. We

cannot have all three decisions at once. The firm must settle on one of the

three objectives or some compromise among them.

Of course, the businessman is not the only one who suffers from the

desire to pursue a number of incompatible objectives. It is all too easy to

try to embrace at one time all of the attractive-sounding goals one can

muster and difficult to reject any one of them. Even the most learned have

suffered from this difficulty. It is precisely on these grounds that one

great economist was led to remark that the much-discussed objective of the

greatest good for the greatest number contains one "greatest" too many.

It is most frequently assumed in economic analysis that the firm is

trying to maximize its total profits. However, there is no reason to

believe that all businessmen pursue the same objectives. For example, a

small firm which is run by its owner may seek to maximize the proprietor's

free time subject to the constraint that his earnings exceed some minimum

level, and, indeed, there have been cases of overworked businessmen who, on

medical advice, have turned down profitable business opportunities.

It has also been suggested, on the basis of some observation, that

firms often seek to maximize the money value of their sales (their total

revenue) subject to a constraint that their profits do not fall short of

some minimum level which is just on the borderline of acceptability. That

is, so long as profits are at a satisfactory level, management will devote

the bulk of its energy and resources to the expansion of sales. Such a goal

may, perhaps, be explained by the businessman's desire to maintain his

competitive position, which is partly dependent on the sheer size of his

enterprise, or it may be a matter of the interests of management (as

distinguished from shareholders), since management's salaries may be

related more closely to the size of the firm's operations than to its

profits, or it may simply be a matter of prestige.

In any event, though they may help him to formulate his own aims and

sometimes be able to show him that more ambitious goals are possible and

relevant, it is not the job of the operations researcher or the economist

to tell the businessman what his goals should be. Management's aims must be

taken to be whatever they are, and the job of the analyst is to find the

conclusions which follow from these objectives—that is, to describe what

businessmen do to achieve these goals, and perhaps to prescribe methods for

pursuing them more efficiently.

The major point, both in economic analysis and in operations-research

investigation of business problems, is that the nature of the firm's

objectives cannot be assumed in advance. It is important to determine the

nature of the firm's objectives before proceeding to the formal model-

building and the computations based on it. As is obviously to be expected,

many of the conclusions of the analysis will vary with the choice of

objective function. However, as some of the later discussion in this

chapter will show, a change in objectives can, sometimes surprisingly,

leave some significant relationships invariant. Where this is true, it is

very convenient to find it out in advance before embarking on the

investigation of a specific problem. For if there are some problems for

which the optimum decision will be the same, no matter which of a number of

objectives the firm happens to adopt, it is legitimate to avoid altogether

the difficult job of determining company goals before undertaking an

analysis.

2. The Profit-Maximizing Firm

Let us first examine some of the conventional theory of the profit-

maximizing firm. In the chapter on the differential calculus, the basic

marginal condition for profit maximization was derived as an illustration.

Let us now rederive this marginal-cost-equals-marginal-revenue condition

with the aid of a verbal and a geometric argument.

The proposition is that no firm can be earning maximum profits unless

its marginal cost and its marginal revenue are (at least approximately)

equal, i.e., unless an additional unit of output will bring in as much

money as it costs to produce, so that its marginal profitability is zero.

It is easy to show why this must be so. Suppose a firm is producing

200,000 units of some item, x, and that at that output level, the marginal

revenue from x production is $1.10 whereas its marginal cost is only 96

cents. Additional units of x will, therefore, each bring the firm some 14

cents = $1.10 — 0.96 more than they cost, and so the firm cannot be

maximizing its profits by sticking to its 200,000 production level.

Similarly, if the marginal cost of x exceeds its marginal revenue, the firm

cannot be maximizing its profits, for it is neglecting to take advantage of

its opportunity to save money—by reducing its output it would reduce its

income, but it would reduce its costs by an even greater amount.

We can also derive the marginal-cost-equals-marginal-revenue

proposition with the aid of Figure 1. At any output, OQ, total revenue is

represented by the area OQPR under the marginal revenue curve (see Rule 9

of Chapter 3). Similarly, total cost is represented by the area OQKC

immediately below the marginal cost curve. Total profit, which is the

difference between total revenue and total cost is, therefore, represented

by the difference between the two areas—that is, total profits are given by

the lightly shaded area TKP minus the small, heavily shaded area, RTC. Now,

it is clear that from point Q a move to the right will increase the size of

the profit area TKP. In fact, only at output OQm will this area have

reached its maximum size—profits will encompass the entire area TKMP.

But at output OQm marginal cost equals marginal revenue—indeed, it is

the crossing of the marginal cost and marginal revenue curves at that point

which prevents further moves to the right (further output increases) from

adding still more to the total profit area. Thus, we have once again

established that at the point of maximum profits, marginal costs and

marginal revenues must be equal.

Before leaving the discussion of this proposition, it is well to

distinguish explicitly between it and its invalid converse. It is not

generally true that any output level at which marginal cost and marginal

revenue happen to be equal (i.e., where marginal profit is zero) will be a

profit-maximizing level. There may be several levels of production at which

marginal cost and marginal revenue are equal, and some of these output

quantities may be far from advantageous for the firm. In Figure 1 this

condition is satisfied at output OQt as well as at OQm. But at OQt the firm

obtains only the net loss (negative profit) represented by heavily shaded

area RTC. A move in either direction from point Qt will help the firm

either by reducing its costs more than it cuts its revenues (a move to the

left) or by adding to its revenues more than to its costs. Output OQt is

thus a point of minimum profits even though it meets the marginal profit-

maximization condition, "marginal revenue equals marginal cost."

This peculiar result is explained by recalling that the condition,

"marginal profitability equals zero," implies only that neither a small

increase nor a small decrease in quantity will add to profits. In other

words, it means that we are at an output at which the total profit curve

(not shown) is level—going neither uphill nor downhill. But while the top

of a hill (the maximum profit output) is such a level spot, plateaus and

valleys (minimum profit outputs) also have the same characteristic—they are

level. That is, they are points of zero marginal profit, where marginal

cost equals marginal revenue.

We conclude that while at a profit-maximizing output marginal cost

must equal marginal revenue, the converse is not correct—it is not true

that at an output at which marginal cost equals marginal revenue the firm

can be sure of maximizing its profits.

3. Application: Pricing and Cost Changes

The preceding theorem permits us to make a number of predictions about

the behavior of the profit-maximizing firm and to set up some normative

"operations research" rules for its operation. We can determine not only

the optimal output, but also the profit-maximizing price with the aid of

the demand curve for the product of the firm. For, given the optimal

output, we can find out from the demand curve what price will permit the

company to sell this quantity, and that is necessarily the optimal price.

In Figure 1, where the optimal output is OQm we see that the corresponding

price is QmPm where point Pm is the point on the demand curve above Qm

(note that Pm is not the point of intersection of the marginal cost and the

marginal revenue curves).

It was shown in the last section of Chapter 4 how our theorem can also

enable us to predict the effect of a change in tax rates or some other

change in cost on the firm's output and pricing. We need merely determine

how this change shifts the marginal cost curve to find the new profit-

maximizing price-output combination by finding the new point of

intersection of the marginal cost and marginal revenue curves. Let us

recall one particular result for use later in this chapter—the theorem

about the effects of a change in fixed costs. It will be remembered that a

change in fixed costs never has any effect on the firm's marginal cost

curve because marginal fixed cost is always zero (by definition, an

additional unit of output adds nothing to fixed costs). Hence, if the

profit-maximizing firm's rents, its total assessed taxes, or some other

fixed cost increases, there will be no change in the output-price level at

which its marginal cost equals its marginal revenue. In other words, the

profit-maximizing firm will make no price or output changes in response to

any increase or decrease in its fixed costs! This rather unexpected result

is certainly not in accord with common business practice and requires some

further comment which will be supplied presently.

4. Extension: Multiple Products and Inputs

The firm's output decisions- are normally more complicated, even in

principle, than the preceding decisions suggest. Almost all companies

produce a variety of products and these various commodities typically

compete for the firm's investment funds and its productive capacity. At any

given time there are limits to what the company can produce, and often, if

it decides to increase its production of product x, this must be done at

the expense of product y. In other words, such a company cannot simply

expand the output of x to its optimum level without taking into account the

effects of this decision on the output of y.

For a profit-maximizing decision which takes both commodities into

account we have a marginal rule which is a special case of Rule 2 of

Chapter 3:

Any limited input (including investment funds) should be allocated

between the two outputs x and у in such a way that the marginal profit

yield of the input, i, in the production of x equals the marginal profit

yield of the input in the production of y.

If the condition is violated the firm cannot be maximizing its

profits, because the firm can add to its earnings simply by shifting some

of г out of the product where it obtains the lower return and into the

manufacture of the other.

Stated another way, this last theorem asserts that if the firm is

maximizing its profits, a reduction in its output of x by an amount which

is worth, say, $5, should release just exactly enough productive capacity,

C, to permit the output of у to be increased $5 worth. For this means that

the marginal return of the released capacity is exactly the same in the

production of either x or y, which is what the previous version of this

rule asserted.3

Still another version of this result is worth describing: Suppose the

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