Video Transcript: Perfect Competition in the Short Run
Hey, welcome back. Okay, in this first video, in the last unit, unit 12, we're going to discuss perfect competition in the short run. Okay, what is perfect competition? Right, homogeneous products are all perfect substitutes. Right, that's perfect competition. That this product is a is a perfect substitute for this product, right? There's no quality differentiation. All firms have access to factors of production, the same amount of raw materials, the same equal equal playing ground, the same type of equipment, the same type of labor. Okay, large number of buyers and sellers. Right, we have a large audience of consumers to sell to. Free entry, exit to and from markets. Right, so you can leave and come in that market whenever you please. Right, there's no barriers. Perfectly elastic demand curve. Right, that means it's in perfect demand. They want this is highly demanded. Okay, perfect knowledge and information that everything is available. So we're just defining perfect competition here, and profit maximization that profit is maximized. Price and output and perfect competition. When drawing perfect competition diagrams. Remember to make a distinction between the market and a representative individual firm. Okay, so here you'll see the market supply and demand curve. Here you'll see our equilibrium price. Here is our output. Okay, here's our demand curve, our supply curve, right? So here you'll see that revenues, costs, and profits for a competitive firm is here, right? Each individual firm is a price taker in a perfectly competitive market. Average revenue equals marginal revenue at every level of output, and we must assume that the aim for each firm is to find a profit-maximizing output, right? So here you can see that price is in equilibrium, right? So our average revenue equals marginal revenue, and the costs increase as the price increases. So this is the shutdown price in the short run. Okay, so price equals the minimum average variable cost is the shutdown price for a competitive firm in the short run, right? So the average variable cost, right? The so the minimum that the base case that we can make for our average cost, right? That anything below that, we need to be shutting it down. If we are breaking below, if we are if we are below that, or if we are above that, right? Minimum average cost. We if we start breaking above that minimum average cost line, we need to consider breaking it down, shutting it down, right? So here you can see our average cost, our actual cost, and then our marginal cost, right? So we break below the average cost, average variable cost, then we need to continue to we need to or break above that. We need to shut it down.