 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
In economics, a composite good is an abstraction that represents all but one of the goods in the relevant budget. [1]
Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Consumer demand theory shows how the composite may be treated as if it were only a single good as to properties hypothesized about demand. The composite good represents what is given up along consumer's budget constraint to consume more of the first good.
A budget constraint represents all the combinations of goods and services that a consumer may purchase given current prices within his or her given income. Consumer theory uses the concepts of a budget constraint and a preference map to analyze consumer choices. Both concepts have a ready graphical representation in the two-good case.
Budget constraints are designed to show the maximum amount of a good, or combination of goods, that can be purchased by a consumer given a limited budget. In a single-good world, the cost of a good cannot be related to any other opportunities. Therefore, opportunity costs cannot be calculated.
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost, or alternative cost, of making a particular choice is the value of the most valuable choice out of those that were not taken. In other words, opportunity will require sacrifices.
The addition of one new good to a single-good market allows for opportunity costs to be determined only in relation to that other good. However, its weakness is that it ignores all other possible choices. Trying to solve this problem by adding even more goods to the market makes analysis unwieldy. Under these circumstances, economic modelers are forced to choose between goods in order to create a simple model.
The concept of the composite good addresses this problem. The addition of a composite good in a single-good model (bringing it up to two) allows for all other opportunities to be accounted for. Since the composite is considered a single good only for purposes of the model, analysis can be made on a two-dimensional graph. Optimal choices represent the bundle of two goods; the first good and the composite.
A final step can be taken in relating the composite good to a unit of account such as money by setting the price of the composite good to 1. Since the prices of all other goods are known, the composite good can be converted into any combination of bundles that represent the optimal choice other than the first good. This final step clarifies the relation of the model to the real world where many goods can be stated in terms of money value. In John R. Hicks's classic Value and Capital (1939), a composite good was used to generalize mathematically from consumer demand equilibrium for an individual in the 2-good case to market equilibrium via supply and demand in the n-good case.
In economics, unit of account is one of the functions of money. The value of something is measured in a specific currency. This allows different things to compared against each other; for example, goods, services, assets, liabilities, labor, income, expenses. It lends meaning to profits, losses, liability, or assets.
Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment. Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered as money.
Value and Capital is a book by the British economist John Richard Hicks, published in 1939. It is considered a classic exposition of microeconomic theory. Central results include:
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behaviour of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms.
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics focusing on the determination of goods, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand. This determination is often mediated through a hypothesized maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production, in accordance with rational choice theory.
In economics, specifically general equilibrium theory, a perfect market is defined by several idealizing conditions, collectively called perfect competition. In theoretical models where conditions of perfect competition hold, it has been theoretically demonstrated that a market will reach an equilibrium in which the quantity supplied for every product or service, including labor, equals the quantity demanded at the current price. This equilibrium would be a Pareto optimum.
In microeconomics, supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It postulates that, holding all else equal, in a competitive market, the unit price for a particular good, or other traded item such as labor or liquid financial assets, will vary until it settles at a point where the quantity demanded will equal the quantity supplied, resulting in an economic equilibrium for price and quantity transacted.
In economics, an indifference curve connects points on a graph representing different quantities of two goods, points between which a consumer is indifferent. That is, the consumer has no preference for one combination or bundle of goods over a different combination on the same curve. One can also refer to each point on the indifference curve as rendering the same level of utility (satisfaction) for the consumer. In other words, an indifference curve is the locus of various points showing different combinations of two goods providing equal utility to the consumer. Utility is then a device to represent preferences rather than something from which preferences come. The main use of indifference curves is in the representation of potentially observable demand patterns for individual consumers over commodity bundles.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He was considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS/LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
In economics, economic equilibrium is a situation in which economic forces such as supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the (equilibrium) values of economic variables will not change. For example, in the standard textbook model of perfect competition, equilibrium occurs at the point at which quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal. Market equilibrium in this case is a condition where a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers. This price is often called the competitive price or market clearing price and will tend not to change unless demand or supply changes, and the quantity is called the "competitive quantity" or market clearing quantity. However, the concept of equilibrium in economics also applies to imperfectly competitive markets, where it takes the form of a Nash equilibrium.
The theory of consumer choice is the branch of microeconomics that relates preferences to consumption expenditures and to consumer demand curves. It analyzes how consumers maximize the desirability of their consumption as measured by their preferences subject to limitations on their expenditures, by maximizing utility subject to a consumer budget constraint.
Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with issues related to efficiency, effectiveness, value and behavior in the production and consumption of health and healthcare. In broad terms, health economists study the functioning of healthcare systems and health-affecting behaviors such as smoking.
In economics and particularly in consumer choice theory, the income-consumption curve is a curve in a graph in which the quantities of two goods are plotted on the two axes; the curve is the locus of points showing the consumption bundles chosen at each of various levels of income.
In economics and particularly in consumer choice theory, the substitution effect is one component of the effect of a change in the price of a good upon the amount of that good demanded by a consumer, the other being the income effect.
Allocative efficiency is a state of the economy in which production represents consumer preferences; in particular, every good or service is produced up to the point where the last unit provides a marginal benefit to consumers equal to the marginal cost of producing.
Real estate economics is the application of economic techniques to real estate markets. It tries to describe, explain, and predict patterns of prices, supply, and demand. The closely related field of housing economics is narrower in scope, concentrating on residential real estate markets, while the research of real estate trends focuses on the business and structural changes affecting the industry. Both draw on partial equilibrium analysis, urban economics, spatial economics, basic and extensive research, surveys, and finance.
There are two fundamental theorems of welfare economics. The first theorem states that a market will tend toward a competitive equilibrium that is weakly Pareto optimal when the market maintains the following three attributes:
Walras's law is a principle in general equilibrium theory asserting that budget constraints imply that the values of excess demand must sum to zero. That is:
A relative price is the price of a commodity such as a good or service in terms of another; i.e., the ratio of two prices. A relative price may be expressed in terms of a ratio between the prices of any two goods or the ratio between the price of one good and the price of a market basket of goods. A relative price is an opportunity cost. Microeconomics can be seen as the study of how economic agents react to changes in relative prices, and of how relative prices are affected by the behavior of those agents.
In economics and other social sciences, preference is the ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility, a process which results in an optimal "choice". The character of the individual preferences is determined purely by taste factors, independent of considerations of prices, income, or availability of goods.
This glossary of economics is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in economics, its sub-disciplines, and related fields.