Consumer Surplus Measure
A Consumer Surplus Measure is a economic measure that ...
- See: Deadweight Loss, Mainstream Economics, Marxian Surplus Value, Market Value, Willingness to Accept, Profit (Accounting), Break-Even (Economics).
References
2023
- (Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus#Consumer_surplus Retrieved:2023-11-5.
- Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer is willing to pay more for a unit of a good than the current asking price, they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they would if the price was their maximum willingness to pay. They are receiving the same benefit, the obtainment of the good, at a lesser cost.[1] An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. The utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent quantities.
The maximum amount a consumer would be willing to pay for a given quantity of a good is the sum of the maximum price they would pay for the first unit, the (lower) maximum price they would be willing to pay for the second unit, etc. Typically these prices are decreasing; they are given by the individual demand curve, which must be generated by a rational consumer who maximizes utility subject to a budget constraint.[1] Because the demand curve is downward sloping, there is diminishing marginal utility. Diminishing marginal utility means a person receives less additional utility from an additional unit. However, the price of a product is constant for every unit at the equilibrium price. The extra money someone would be willing to pay for the number units of a product less than the equilibrium quantity and at a higher price than the equilibrium price for each of these quantities is the benefit they receive from purchasing these quantities.[2] For a given price the consumer buys the amount for which the consumer surplus is highest. 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.[3] For a single price change, consumer surplus can provide an approximation of changes in welfare. With multiple price and/or income changes, however, consumer surplus cannot be used to approximate economic welfare because it is not single-valued anymore. More modern methods are developed later to estimate the welfare effect of price changes using consumer surplus.
The aggregate consumers' surplus is the sum of the consumer's surplus for all individual consumers. This aggregation can be represented graphically, as shown in the above graph of the market demand and supply curves. The aggregate consumers' surplus can also be said to be the maxim of satisfaction a consumer derives from particular goods and services.
- Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer is willing to pay more for a unit of a good than the current asking price, they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they would if the price was their maximum willingness to pay. They are receiving the same benefit, the obtainment of the good, at a lesser cost.[1] An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. The utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent quantities.
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Template:Cite encyclopedia
- ↑ "What a Consumer Surplus Tells Us". https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer_surplus.asp.
- ↑ Willig, Robert D. (1976). "Consumer's Surplus Without Apology". The American Economic Review 66 (4): 589–597. ISSN 0002-8282. JSTOR 1806699. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1806699.