# Questions tagged [consumer-surplus]

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### consumer surplus decreasing

MRU has the following question on a quiz: Suppose the government forced all bread manufacturers to sell their products at a “fair price” that was half the current, free-market price. To keep it ...
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### Consumer Surplus [closed]

Is there a case where the consumer surplus being negative does not mean that the producer surplus increases? Is it true that as consumer surplus increases, producer surplus decreases and vice versa?
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### Integral solution (or a simpler) to consumer surplus - What is wrong?

Problem Given demand $D(p)=A-ap$, and $A,a>0$ and a fixed price $0<p_1<A/a$ by some company. Calculate the consumer surplus and its derivative with respect to $p$. What is this number? My ...
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### Can individual consumers ever be price-makers, and can they thereby have major effects on welfare?

Suppose there's a big demand shock on some good X. As long as X has fairly standard supply and demand curves, that'll raise the price. And all of the buyers who would have bought at the lower price ...
143 views

### Does consumer surplus over-weigh the interests of high-income consumers?

An individual's willingness to pay for a good not only depends on how much they value that good, but also on their income level (at least under the conventional non-economics definition of the word '...
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### Is the consumer surplus on a Giffen/Veblen good negative?

When drawing the demand and supply curves on a quantity/product space for an upwards sloping demand, assuming the two curves intersect, I noticed that the traditional consumer surplus region lies ...
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### Does utility in economics also refer to producer's surplus ? How to balance the consumer surplus and producer surplus?

I am confused about the use of utility in economics and how it relates to allocative efficiency. At 4:35 and 5:07 in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a3wXj1o91k) he talks about how at the ...
322 views

### Is the amount of tax that consumers pay the same as the amount producers pay?

I am confused about the amount of tax producers and consumers pay. On this diagram, I can see that the supply curve increases by twenty dollars, as the tax is 20 dollars. The consumers have to pay 10 ...
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### Real world evidence that voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial?

The other day I was having a debate with a supporter of high taxes. I decided to argue against this by explaining the concept of the deadweight loss of taxation. In order to do so, I started with ...
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### Why is consumer surplus the area under the curve?

So I understand that the definition of consumer surplus is the difference between what the consumer pays and what the consumer would have been willing to pay. I just don't understand why the consumer ...
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### Numerical Question on a subsidized monopoly

Suppose a government agency has a monopoly in the provision of internet connections. The marginal cost of providing internet connections is $\frac12$, whereas the inverse demand function is given by: ...
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### Can consumer surplus be negative if a consumer is forced to make a purchase?

Assume there is a good that a producer sells for $100$. A consumer's willingness to pay for that good is $50$. However a government program forces consumers to purchase the good irrespective of their ...
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### What are the (immediate) effects of changing a good's price on consumer and producer surplus?

Basically, I'm trying to understand why the total surplus is maximized at the equilibrium and what happens if the price isn't at the equilibrium. Say the price of a good is the equilibrium price. ...
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### How big is the consumer surplus for typical consumer goods?

Economic transactions happen when both think it will benefit them - that is, when there are gains from trade on both sides. But that says nothing about the size of that gain. If you're a consumer, ...
799 views

### Can a monopoly INCREASE the market surplus compared with a competitive market?

Monopolies are often blamed for DWLs(Dead Weight Losses), while competitive markets believed to work without DWLs (assuming zero taxes/subsidies and zero externalities). But I think I found an ...
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### Consumer surplus from a Hicksian demand curve: what is it?

A Hicksian demand curve indicates how much of a good will be demanded given price holding level of overall utility fixed. When in equilibrium with a supply curve we end up with this area we would ...
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### what is consumer surplus practically?

In Microeconomics producer surplus is equivalent to profits minus fixed costs. However getting a tangible definition of consumer surplus has been difficult for me to ponder. What is the practical ...
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### Intuition for why $EV>CV$ for a normal good

I understand the mathematical proof and the graphical illustration behind this property ($EV>CV$ for the variation in the price of a normal good), but I still do not understand the economic ...
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### Consumer behavior with constrained demand

Suppose there is a linear demand function $D(p)$ describing the demand of an individual consumer. This is derived from a utility function or is just observed, but let us assume it is correct. Now ...
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### Consumer surplus with isoelastic demand

Let $q(p) = \frac{1}{p}$ denote the demand function and $p^*$ some equilibrium price. Consumer surplus is defined as \begin{align} CS = \int_{p^*}^\infty\frac{1}{p} dp= \ln(\infty) - \ln(p^*) = \...
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### Change in Consumer Surplus with Two Price Changes: Is it Path Dependent?

The diagrams below showing demand for goods X1 and X2 are adapted from Johansson P-O (1991) An Introduction to Modern Welfare Economics (p 43). Demand for each good is assumed to be a function of its ...
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### Issues with an application of definite internal and marginal utilities

I'm going to state the problem without much context because it is an issue of the math I'm doing, rather than any specific econ concept. Condition. I'm trying to prove this.  V(q_l) - \theta_l*q_l ...
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### Why is EV<CV if the good is inferior?

Through the Slutsky equation I know that if the good is inferior the marshallian demand function is steeper than the hicksian demand but I cannot understand why the Compensating variation is higher ...
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### consumer and producer surplus

So, I am trying to evaluate the consumer and producer surplus. In my notes it is written that the new consumer surplus (defined by the change of the graph from pre-subsidy to post-subsidy) is G + A + ...
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### Calculate deadweight loss from cost and inverse demand function in monopoly [closed]

Consider a monopolist with inverse demand p = 200 - 2*q. The firm's total cost function is C(q) = 100 + 20*q. What is the deadweight loss of monopoly? To my understading, since we don't have any ...
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### Calculating a cross price substitution/income effect

I am given a utility function $U(x,y)$, income $I$ and prices $p_x,p_y$. Then the price of $y$ rises to $p_y' = 3 \cdot p_y$. How are we supposed to calculate the substitution effect and income effect ...
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### Subsidies Incidence on Producers and Consumers

When calculating the incidence on producers and consumers using a demand and supply curve is dead weight loss a part of the incidence? I know that for example the producer's incidence is a rectangle ...
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### Impact of a reduction of distortions in a flat consumption tax

I ask about the survey results of some prominent Australian economists shown here (Which is a similar Australian-centric version of the very interesting IGM Forum Surveys). The results of the survey ...
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### Evidence that open source production processes increase efficiency and/or consumer surplus?

Is there peer reviewed evidence that open source production processes increase efficiency and/or consumer surplus? It seems that the first theorem of welfare economics requires complete markets which ...
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### Consumer surplus in case of perfectly inelastic demand

How do we define consumer surplus in the case of perfectly inelastic demand? This question was inspired by the comments following this answer. For a graph of inelastic demand please also see the ...
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### Consumer Surplus question

The demand for rail travel is $Q^d = 600 - 2P$ where quantity is thousands of train journeys per quarter and $P$ is in £ per journey. How much would the consumer surplus change if rising cost of ...
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### Equilibrium price and quantity - consumer and producer surplus

Inverse function of market demand for certain good is equal to $P=100-0.25Q$, inverse supply function is $P=20+0.55Q$. Calculate equilibrium price and quantity. Furthermore calculate consumer and ...
Consider a market with a monopolist firm that has zero marginal cost and faces demand $D(p;\mathbf{a})$, where $\mathbf{a}$ is a vector of parameters and $p$ is the price. The monopolist maximizes ...