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Monopoly pricing without perfect price discrimination results in market inefficiencies when compared to other market structures. The inefficiencies in question are a loss of both consumer and producer surplus otherwise known as a deadweight loss. The loss in both surplus' are deemed allocatively inefficient and not socially optimal.
The Ramsey problem, or Ramsey pricing, or Ramsey–Boiteux pricing, is a second-best policy problem concerning what prices a public monopoly should charge for the various products it sells in order to maximize social welfare (the sum of producer and consumer surplus) while earning enough revenue to cover its fixed costs.
Given the presence of this deadweight loss, the combined surplus (or wealth) for the monopolist and consumers is necessarily less than the total surplus obtained by consumers by perfect competition. Where efficiency is defined by the total gains from trade, the monopoly setting is less efficient than perfect competition.
The consumer's surplus is highest at the largest number of units for which, even for the last unit, the maximum willingness to pay is not below the market price. Consumer surplus can be used as a measurement of social welfare, shown by Robert Willig. [8] For a single price change, consumer surplus can provide an approximation of changes in welfare.
The monopoly power possessed by a MC company means that at its profit-maximising level of production, there will be a net loss of consumer (and producer) surplus. The second source of inefficiency is the fact that MC companies operate with excess capacity.
The producer surplus always decreases, but the consumer surplus may or may not increase; however, the decrease in producer surplus must be greater than the increase, if any, in consumer surplus. Deadweight loss can also be a measure of lost economic efficiency when the socially optimal quantity of a good or a service is not produced.
This means that the amount of consumer surplus, the area below the demand curve and above the price, will be lower. [4] The change in overall social surplus of the market depends on whether the increase in producer surplus due to lower production costs is larger or smaller than the fall in consumer surplus due to higher prices. Note that it is ...
Consumer surplus need not exist, for example in monopolistic markets where the seller can price above the market clearing price. Alternatively, should fixed costs or economies of scale raise the marginal cost of adding more consumers higher than the marginal profit from selling more product, consumer surplus may be captured by the seller. This ...