# What is the difference between the demand schedule and the demand curve?

What is the difference between the demand schedule and the demand curve that a monopolist or monopsonist has? Could someone provide details for both cases or even some paradigm or a graph. I can not clarify this concepts.

Demand schedule is a table that gives you the quantity demanded at different prices.

An example of demand schedule that I found on Wikipedia is shown below:

Demand curve is a curve that plots the demand at different prices in the 2D space defined by $$Q$$ and $$P$$ (see example picture I took from investopedia below).

Demand curve is essentially a plot of demand schedule.

• Why is it necessarily continuous? – Giskard May 28 '20 at 16:04
• @Giskard you are right I corrected it - I just wanted to highlight that demand schedule is usually discrete and demand would be a continuous plot of the discrete demand schedule but you are right it’s not correct to just say demand curve is continuous I dropped that – 1muflon1 May 28 '20 at 16:07
• After all, is it continuous or not? – Hunger Learn May 28 '20 at 16:34
• @HungerLearn the one example depicted is continuous and in entry level classes you would most likely always encounter continuous demand functions but in principle there could be discontinuities due to kinks, or because the function is piece-wise and so on. – 1muflon1 May 28 '20 at 16:37
• @HungerLearn actually I made a mistake kink does not necessarily mean function is discontinuous at a point (only that it fails to have a derivative at that point) a kink would be a place on a function where it suddenly changes direction for example for a function that looks like a letter V kink would be the bottom of V but does not necessarily imply that the function is discontinuous at that point - I wanted to correct it but you can edit comments only up to 5 min – 1muflon1 May 28 '20 at 16:44