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What Is Production?: What You'll Learn To Do: Explain Production and The Production Function
What Is Production?: What You'll Learn To Do: Explain Production and The Production Function
What is Production?
Businesses engage in production. What does that mean exactly? What is involved?
How is steel production different from growing wheat? In this section, we will begin
to learn about the behavior of firms, how they make production decisions, and how
production costs depend on a firm’s production function.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The answers to these questions depend on the production and cost conditions facing
each firm, which is the subject of this module. The answers also depend on the
structure of the market for the product(s) in question. Market structure is a
multidimensional concept that involves how competitive an industry is. It is defined by
questions such as these:
How much market power does each firm in the industry possess?
How similar is each firm’s product to the products of other firms in the
industry?
How difficult is it for new firms to enter the industry?
Do firms compete on the basis of price, advertising, or other product
differences?
Figure 1 illustrates the range of different market structures, which we will explore in
detail in later modules.
Figure 1. The Spectrum of Competition. Firms face different competitive situations. At one extreme—perfect
competition—many firms are all trying to sell identical products. At the other extreme—monopoly—only one
firm is selling the product, and this firm faces no competition. Monopolistic competition and oligopoly fall
between the extremes of perfect competition and monopoly. Monopolistic competition is a situation with many
firms selling similar, but not identical, products. Oligopoly is a situation with few firms that sell identical or
similar products.
Factors of Production
In this module, we want to explore the relationship between the quantity of output a firm
produces, and the cost of producing that output. The cost of the product depends on
how many inputs (or factors of production) are required to produce the product and what
those inputs cost. We can determine the costs by looking at the firm’s production
function, which we will explore in detail in the next section.
Production is the process (or processes) a firm uses to transform inputs (e.g. labor,
capital, raw materials) into outputs, i.e. the goods or services the firm wishes to sell.
Consider pizza making. The pizzaiolo (pizza maker) takes flour, water, and yeast to
make dough. Similarly, the pizzaiolo may take tomatoes, spices, and water to make
pizza sauce. He or she rolls out the dough, brushes on the pizza sauce, and adds
cheese and other toppings. The pizzaiolo uses a peel—the shovel-like wooden tool– to
put the pizza into the oven to cook. Once baked, the pizza goes into a box (if it’s for
takeout) and the customer pays for the good. What are the inputs (or factors of
production) in the production process for this pizza?
Economists divide factors of production into several categories:
The cost of producing pizza (or any output) depends on the amount of labor capital, raw
materials, and other inputs required and the price of each input to the entrepreneur.
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microeconomics/chapter/what-is-production/