Los gerentes, los beneficios de los mercados

Managers, Profits, and Markets

Managerial economics provides a systematic, logical way of analyzing business decisions that focuses on the economic forces that shape both day-today

decisions and long-run planning decisions. Managerial economics applies microeconomic theory—the study of the behavior of individual economic

agents—to business problems in order to teach business decision makers how to use economic analysis to make decisions that will achieve the firm's

goal: the maximization of profit.

Economic theory helps managers understand real-world business problems by using simplifying assumptions to abstract away from irrelevant ideas and

information and turn complexity into relative simplicity. Like a road map, economic theory ignores everything irrelevant to the problem and reduces

business problems to their most essential components.

The opportunity cost of using resources to produce goods and services is the amount the firm's owner gives up by using these resources. Opportunity

costs are either explicit opportunity costs or implicit opportunity costs. Explicit costs are the costs of using market-supplied resources, which equal the

monetary payments to hire, rent, or lease resources owned by others. Implicit costs are the costs of using owner-supplied resources, which are the best

earnings forgone from using resources owned by the firm in the firm's own production process. Total economic cost is the sum of explicit and implicit

costs. Economic profit is the difference between total revenue and total economic cost:

Economic profit = Total revenue - Total economic cost

= Total revenue - Explicit costs - Implicit costs

Accounting profit differs from economic profit because accounting profit does not subtract from total revenue the implicit costs of using resources:

Accounting profit = Total revenue - Explicit costs

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