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Microeconomics
Course: Microeconomics > Unit 4
Lesson 1: Consumer and producer surplus- Demand curve as marginal benefit curve
- Consumer surplus introduction
- Total consumer surplus as area
- Producer surplus
- Equilibrium, allocative efficiency and total surplus
- Lesson Overview: Consumer and Producer Surplus
- Consumer and Producer Surplus and Allocative Efficiency
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Demand curve as marginal benefit curve
To get a better intuition about how much a consumer values a good in a market, we think of demand as a marginal benefit curve. In this video we look at the demand curve from a marginal benefit framework. Created by Sal Khan.
Want to join the conversation?
- Can somebody please explain to me what marginal benefits is and give me some examples?(11 votes)
- Marginal benefit is the added benefit of each additional unit(thing) consumed.
For example,
You are thirsty. You drink a glass of water. Now that you are less thirsty, you would probably drink less water, because it is more wise for you to drink less water than before because you are not that thirsty anymore (there is less benefit of having water). For your third drink, you may drink no water at all because there is not much benefit, the benefit for drinking the first glass of water was more than the benefit of drinking the second/third glass of water. So we can see the marginal benefit goes down as more unit is consumed.
Without marginal benefit, we would have kept consuming because the value for consuming a unit never decreases. That means we would have eaten food or drank water all the time.(60 votes)
- What is the definition of Marginal Benefit?(27 votes)
- A hint: when you read XXXXX marginal, interpret as XXXXX additional.(24 votes)
- I wonder if a previous video on how to look demand curve as marginal benefit curve is missed.
I totally can not understand the whole video the first time I saw this.(13 votes)- You should watch everything in https://www.khanacademy.org/science/microeconomics/supply-demand-equilibrium first.(3 votes)
- I would think that marginal benefit was defined as "the extra benefit gained from increasing the quantity sold by one". So if the firm sold car#1 for $60, and car#2 for $50, the marginal benefit would be $60 for car#1 and $50 for car#2. If the firm sets the same price for all cars, the marginal benefit is the same for all cars.
Is this definition right or wrong? He doesn't clearly define marginal benefit, and the answers regarding its definition (in this comment section) are different.(6 votes)- Remember that the word "marginal" means "the next one". You're going to want to think in terms of consumers on this one.
Let's say you're hungry, and you're willing to pay $10 for your first hamburger. The marginal benefit of that first hamburger is $10. Then, you start getting full, so you think you'd only be willing to pay $8 for the next hamburger. The marginal benefit of that second hamburger is $8. Then now you're getting really full, so you're only willing to pay $6 for a third burger. That third burger has a marginal benefit of $6.
Hope that helps!(15 votes)
- Where can I find the video Sal mentioned where he introduces PPF?(8 votes)
- Sal covers the Production Possibility Frontier(PPF) here :
http://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microeconomics/choices-opp-cost-tutorial/production-possibilities/v/production-possibilities-frontier(5 votes)
- sal gives the p.p.f (production possiable fruntier) as an axemple (), where can i find the relevant video? 3:58(6 votes)
- Even if there is 1 car why would the customers gets excited to pay $60 K? Instead they could wait until the price goes down.(4 votes)
- That is the whole point of economics, predicting consumer habits. Some of us will wait (I'm assuming you will) but others will want to get the product, regardless of the price.(7 votes)
- In the middle of the video, Sal saids that the 1st person would be able to get the new car for "more than they were willing to pay". I thought that the 1st person would be able to get the car at less than they were willing to pay since the price decreased from 60k to 50k.(4 votes)
- - And yes, you're right, he has said it backwards. At a price of $50,000, the first person will be getting the car for less than what they were willing to pay. 2:51(1 vote)
- So for the 1st unit the marginal benefit would be 60?(2 votes)
- Yes, it is. Sal does mention that the marginal benefit for the 3rd car is 40 at3:30
But basically, the marginal benefit for the 3rd consumer is 40, yet for the second one still 50, but s/he is paying 40, and for the first one its 60 yet paying 40.(3 votes)
- What are the 4 factors of production ?(2 votes)
- Everyone in economics can agree on three: Land, Labor, and Capital. However, it is debated that there is a fourth: Entrepreneurship or Entrepreneurial Ability, many people argue that this is just specialized labor.(3 votes)
Video transcript
Voiceover: In all of our conversations about demand curves so far, I've been generally talking about price driving quantities. So for example, we've been saying, using say this demand curve right here for a new car in terms of how many would be sold per day, we would say things like, "Well look, if we price
it at $60,000 per car," this is in thousands of dollars. "If we price it at $60,000 per car, "we are going to sell one car. "If we price it at $50,000 a car, "we are going to sell two cars." The way that I've been talking about it is given a price, how many are we actually going to sell? What I want to do in this video is think about it the other way around. We're going to look at the
exact same demand curve, the exact same relationship
between price and quantity, but we're going to conceptualize it in our heads in a
slightly different way. We're going to think about it in terms of quantity driving price. To think of it that way, imagine that we are the producers of this given model of a new car. We go the other way. We don't say, "How many will we sell "at a price of $60,000?" Or, "How much will we sell
at a price of $50,000?" We'll go from the point of view of what if we only produce one car a week? If we only produced one car a week, how much could we get for that car? Let's say somehow you're
able to figure that out. You're able to read people's minds or you have some type of a market study. When you ask that question you're like, "Look if you only allowed
one car to be sold each week, "you determine that in that week there "is going to be somebody, "somebody's going to think that it's worth "$60,000 to buy that car." That person, they're willingness to pay, that person is going to be
willing to trade $60,000. They're going to be willing to forego what else they could have bought for that $60,000 and
instead they want that car. Then you would plot that
point right over there. If you only had one unit, you
could sell it for $60,000. Now let's go, let's keeping
asking ourselves for more units. Let's say, what if we
wanted to sell two units? Well, if you wanted to sell two units, you could definitely sell
one unit for $60,000, assuming that you could
get that first person, but that second person, this might have been the person that just wants a car so
badly it just resonated with them in some way. For that second unit, the second person who is
going to need to buy your car, might not be as excited about it. That second person will only be willing to forego $50,000. That second person would
be willing to forego 50. So if you wanted to sell two units, if you insist on selling two units, and if you're assuming you're going to give the same price for everyone. We'll talk about in the future how you might give different prices to different people. Assuming you want to give
the same price to everyone, you're going to have to
sell your car for $50,000. Now clearly that first
person is definitely going to jump at it. They're going to be able
to get the car for more than they were willing to pay. More than what it was worth to them. More than the benefit for them, but if you want two people, now you're going to have
to set this up for $50,000. Now the same logic. Now what if we want to sell three cars? What if we want to sell three cars a week? Well, if we price it at $50,000, we'll definitely get those first two, but the third person might not jump. The third person isn't
going to be as excited about it or need it as
much as these first two. So you do a market study
or you're able to read people's minds. You're like, "Look the third person, "for the market, the marginal benefit." Let me write this word down. The marginal benefit. The marginal benefit for the next unit, the next unit is going to be $40,000. To get that next buyer, and it could be multiple buyers buying each unit or it could be one buyer buying all of the units. Maybe it's some type of a
car rental company saying, "Oh, we don't need to get ... For three "of these cars I'm not as
excited about it anymore. "My marginal benefit is lower." This is really the same marginal benefit that we talked about when
we talked about the PPF, the Production Possibilities Frontier. In that, we talked
about it very explicitly in terms of trade off, in terms of opportunity cost. Here we're measuring the marginal benefit in terms of price, but price really can be viewed
as a foregone opportunity. If you spend $40,000 on this car, you're making the decision
not to spend $40,000 on something else. A down payment on a house or a nice boat, or whatever else it might be. So really what we're doing, is at any point in this curve, this really is the marginal benefit for that next buyer. That marginal benefit to the market of that next unit of
whatever you are producing. This is a very different way of viewing the exact same demand curve. Before we said, "Okay, if we want to price "it at $50,000, how many
are we going to sell?" Now we're saying, "If we
want to sell only two units, "where can we price it?" We can price it at $50,000. If we want to go from two to three units, we're going to have to price it at the marginal benefit of that third unit to the market and it could be the marginal benefit to that next consumer. Convincing that next consumer to say, "Hey it is worth it to buy this car. "Let's price it at $40,000." I'm going to leave you
there in this video, but what I'm going to think about is depending on where you price it, let's say that we decide that we
want to sell four units every week. So we say, "Well look, to get that fourth "person to buy this car,
we have to price the car "at $30,000." What we're going to talk about in the next video is if you did that, if this is where you decide to price it so that you can sell four units, these other people got really good deals. The first unit could
have gone for much more. The second unit could have still also gone for a good bit, not as much as the first unit. The third unit could
have gone for a little bit less than the second unit, but still more than what you
ended up selling things for. We're going to talk about this idea right over here that some of these consumers are getting more for their money than what they have to pay, or at least in their own minds they are.