Production, Costs, Revenue And Profit

A bakery and a national supermarket chain both sell bread. The bakery pays more for every sack of flour it buys, more per loaf for its ovens, more per delivery for its van. It is not badly run. It is simply small, and in this part of economics size changes the arithmetic. Understanding why is the difference between describing a business and explaining one.

This lesson gives you the four quantities every producer watches: costs, revenue, profit and productivity. You will separate fixed costs from variable ones and total figures from averages, calculate profit from raw sales data, and work out how much output a workforce produces per head. Then you will meet economies of scale, the reason a bigger firm can undercut a smaller one, and diseconomies of scale, the reason getting bigger eventually starts to hurt. Along the way you will meet the awkward question the examiners keep returning to: what happens when the pursuit of profit runs into what is right.