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Microeconomics: Business Objectives

Profit maximisation and alternative business objectives

  • 3 things to know
  • Component 01

Overview

Recall questions on profit, sales revenue and sales volume maximisation, growth, utility maximisation, profit satisficing by managers, and social welfare objectives of firms.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Process

How does sales volume maximisation differ from sales revenue maximisation?

Key term

Why does standard theory assume firms maximise profit?

Key term

What condition must hold at a firm's profit-maximising output?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What condition must hold at a firm's profit-maximising output?

    Model answer

    Marginal cost must equal marginal revenue, with marginal cost rising through marginal revenue at that output.

  2. 2

    Why does standard theory assume firms maximise profit?

    Model answer

    Profit maximisation gives owners the highest possible return and produces a single determinate output for the firm, which makes its behaviour predictable.

  3. 3

    State the condition for sales revenue maximisation.

    Model answer

    Sales revenue is maximised at the output where marginal revenue equals zero.

  4. 4

    A firm abandons profit maximisation for revenue maximisation. What happens to its price and output?

    Model answer

    Output rises and price falls, because the firm keeps expanding past the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue until marginal revenue reaches zero.

  5. 5

    How does sales volume maximisation differ from sales revenue maximisation?

    Model answer

    Volume maximisation targets the largest number of units the firm can sell while still covering all its costs, so average revenue equals average cost, whereas revenue maximisation stops where marginal revenue is zero.

  6. 6

    On a single diagram of a firm's cost and revenue curves, which lies furthest to the right: the profit-maximising, revenue-maximising or volume-maximising output?

    Model answer

    The volume-maximising output is furthest right, the revenue-maximising output is next, and the profit-maximising output is the smallest of the three.

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