Consider two cigarette companies, PM Inc. and Brown Inc. If neither company advertises, the two companies split the market and earn $50 million each. If they both advertise, they again split the market, but profits are lower by $10 million since each company must bear the cost of advertising. Yet if one company advertises while the other does not, the one that advertises attracts customers from the other. In this case, the company that advertises earns $60 million while the company that does not advertise earns only $30 million. Refer to Scenario 17-4. What will these two companies do if they behave as individual profit maximizers?
a.
Neither company will advertise.

b.
Both companies will advertise.

c.
One company will advertise, the other will not.

d.
There is no way of knowing without knowing how many customers are stolen through advertising.

Consider the local telephone company, a natural monopoly. the following graph shows the monthly demand curve for phone services and the company’s marginal revenue (mr), marginal cost (mc), and average total cost (atc) curves. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 price (dollars per subscription) quantity (thousands of subscriptions) d mr mc atc 8, 60 suppose that the government has decided not to regulate this industry, and the firm is free to maximize profits, without constraints. complete the first row of the following table. pricing mechanism short run long-run decision quantity price profit (subscriptions) (dollars per subscription) profit maximization marginal-cost pricing average-cost pricing suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to marginal cost. complete the second row of the previous table. suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to average total cost. complete the third row of the previous table. under average-cost pricing, the government will raise the price of output whenever a firm’s costs increase, and lower the price whenever a firm’s costs decrease. over time, under the average-cost pricing policy, what will the local telephone company most likely do

Which of the following is a characteristic that can be used to guide the design of service systems? a. services cannot be inventoried. b. services are all similar. c. quality work means quality service. d. services businesses are inherently entrepreneurial. e. even service businesses have internal services.

All of the following led to the collapse of the soviet economy except a. a lack of worker incentives. c. inadequate supply of consumer goods. b. a reliance on production quotas. d. the introduction of a market economy.