[对外经济贸易大学经济学导论通用讲义六.pptVIP

* This chapter is very technical and full of definitions and graphs. Most of the material is not very analytical. But it may be harder for some students to see the relevance of this material. So, this PowerPoint begins with a short brainstorming activity on the next slide. This activity asks students to think of several costs that a real-world firm actually faces and the kinds of decisions that are affected by these costs. Having realized that costs are important to business decisions, students should be more motivated to learn the concepts in this chapter. It might also be worthwhile to point out that material in this chapter provides the foundation for the following four chapters. In those four chapters, we will see how firms in different market structures use the cost concepts introduced here to make decisions about how much stuff to produce, what price to charge, and so forth. Learning that material will be much easier for students if they have a good grasp of the material in this chapter. * * In Case 2, the foregone interest is the interest you could have earned on your savings. It is an opportunity cost. This example shows that an important implicit cost is the cost of capital, the foregone returns you could have earned had you used your savings to buy bonds or other assets instead of investing them in your business. The hope is that students will see that what really matters to them is not just the explicit costs, but total (implicit + explicit) costs. * * Accountants keep track of how much money flows into and out of the firm, so they ignore implicit costs. Economists study the pricing and production decisions of firm, which are affected by implicit as well as explicit costs. * * In the following slides, Example 1 will be used to illustrate the production function, marginal product, and a first look at the costs of production. * * Thinking at the margin helps not only Jack, but all managers in the real world, who make business d