IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-15320-6_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Supply Curve

In: The Economics of Imperfect Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Joan Robinson

Abstract

WE have now completed our analysis of price and output for a single firm. We must next discuss the supply curve of a commodity produced by a number of firms. The supply curve for a commodity represents a list of amounts of the commodity which will be associated with various prices. A supply curve tells us that if such and such an output is to be produced, this will be the price. And if the conditions of demand are such that this amount of the commodity is demanded at this price, then this is the output that will be produced. We can imagine that we move along the supply curve by means of successive increases of demand. As the amount demanded increases, the supply price may rise, remain constant, or fall, but each separate amount has a certain price which it is necessary to pay in order to call forth that amount of output. If the price secured by the sale of this amount of output were less, a smaller output would be produced. And if a higher price were secured by the sale of this output, a larger output would be produced. In every case a larger total sum must be offered to call forth a larger total output. A larger output will cost a larger total sum to produce, and a larger total offer must be made in order to procure it. This must be true even though average cost may fall as output increases.

Suggested Citation

  • Joan Robinson, 1969. "The Supply Curve," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Economics of Imperfect Competition, edition 0, chapter 0, pages 85-91, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15320-6_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15320-6_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15320-6_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.