Egt1 Week 1 Research Paper

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EGT1 Task 1 Karen Means This essay will explain the relationship between marginal revenue and marginal cost, and will discuss the importance of these concepts for profit maximization. To understand marginal revenue, we must first understand total revenue. Total revenue is the revenue received from the sale of a given number of items. So, if the retail price of an item is $100, and a company sells one item, the total revenue is at that point $100. Marginal revenue is the change in total revenue resulting from the sale of an additional item. Using our example, should the company sell one more item at $100, the total revenue increases to $200 and the change in revenue because of that sale is $100. Therefore, the marginal revenue in this example would be $100. The sale of a third item would produce the same marginal revenue of $100, because again, the change in revenue from the…show more content…
According to accountants, profit is total sales revenue less total explicit costs. Economically speaking, profit is revenue less explicit costs less implicit costs. Either way, companies are in business to make profit. When a company allows the overall market to set its price by supply and demand, the only control the company has over profit is the number of items it makes. Thus, a purely competitive company seeks to either maximize its profit or minimize its loss (economic) by adjusting the number of items it makes. Marginal revenue and marginal cost are key to this type of profit maximization. Practically speaking, to determine whether or not, and to what extent, a company should expand production, the company would determine how much each additional item sold would add to total revenue (marginal revenue), and how much that same additional item would add to total cost (marginal cost). The company would continue this comparison until it reached the point where the MR was equal to the
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