Suppose you are working for a firm producing cotton balls – an industry for which there are many different firms producing an identical product. the market price is $20 per case of cotton balls, and the firm is currently producing 30 cases. as the manager tasked with making production decisions for the firm, you begin by estimating the cost function, and find that the cost function is given by: = 10 + + 1/3 .

a. is this a short run or long run cost function?

b. what adjustments to the production decisions would you make to increase profits?

c. given your recommendation to (b) above, by how much would the firm’s profits increase?

Consider the local telephone company, a natural monopoly. the following graph shows the monthly demand curve for phone services and the company’s marginal revenue (mr), marginal cost (mc), and average total cost (atc) curves. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 price (dollars per subscription) quantity (thousands of subscriptions) d mr mc atc 8, 60 suppose that the government has decided not to regulate this industry, and the firm is free to maximize profits, without constraints. complete the first row of the following table. pricing mechanism short run long-run decision quantity price profit (subscriptions) (dollars per subscription) profit maximization marginal-cost pricing average-cost pricing suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to marginal cost. complete the second row of the previous table. suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to average total cost. complete the third row of the previous table. under average-cost pricing, the government will raise the price of output whenever a firm’s costs increase, and lower the price whenever a firm’s costs decrease. over time, under the average-cost pricing policy, what will the local telephone company most likely do

Apharmaceutical packaging company (ppc) has decided to reorganize its processes into cells. the company has four different production operations, each requiring a unique piece of equipment. the names and functions of the four pieces of equipment are sort, count, place, and package. the company packages five different families of products (a, b, c, d, and e). the tables below indicate the demand (total units/day by product family), required operations, and operation cycle times for each product family. assume that any individual piece of equipment is available to operate 16 hours/day, but 2 hours (in total) are lost each day on each piece of equipment due to breaks and meetings when operators are not available to operate the equipment. how many minutes/day are available for production

According to this excerpt, a key part of our national security strategy is