6任务4运用需求弹性价格策略.pptVIP

* An example: Student demand for textbooks that their professors have required for their courses. Here, it’s a little more clear that elasticity would be small, but not zero. At a high enough price, some students will not buy their books, but instead will share with a friend, or try to find them in the library, or just take copious notes in class. Another example: Gasoline in the short run. * This is the intermediate case: the demand curve is neither relatively steep nor relatively flat. Buyers are neither relatively price-sensitive nor relatively insensitive to price. (This is also the case where price changes have no effect on revenue.) * A good example here would be breakfast cereal, or nearly anything with readily available substitutes. An elastic demand curve is flatter than a unit elastic demand curve (which itself is flatter than an inelastic demand curve). * “Extreme price sensitivity” means the tiniest price increase causes demand to fall to zero. “Q changes by any %” – when the D curve is horizontal, quantity cannot be determined from price. Consumers might demand Q1 units one month, Q2 units another month, and some other quantity later. Q can change by any amount, but P always “changes by 0%” (i.e., doesn’t change). If perfectly inelastic is one extreme, this case (perfectly elastic) is the other. Here’s a good real-world example of a perfectly elastic demand curve, which foreshadows an upcoming chapter on firms in competitive markets. Suppose you run a small family farm in Iowa. Your main crop is wheat. The demand curve in this market is downward-sloping, and the market demand and supply curves determine the price of wheat. Suppose that price is $5/bushel. Now consider the demand curve facing you, the individual wheat farmer. If you charge a price of $5, you can sell as much or as little as you want. If you charge a price even just a little higher than $5, demand for YOUR wheat will fall to zero: Buyers would not