- [Instructor] Let's say
that you own the only hotel
that is in a city,
and for a wide variety of reasons,
maybe all of the city council
members are your friends
or whatever else, no one else
can build a hotel in the city.
So there are insurmountable
barriers to entry.
So in that situation, you
would have a monopoly.
You are the only player in the market,
and there are very, very
high barriers to entry.
Now, this is a typical cost structure
and demand curve for a monopoly.
We've already talked
about your marginal cost.
It might dip down a little initially,
but then it might go up,
and we could debate
whether that would be true
for a hotel or not,
but this is a typical model we see.
And then while your marginal cost
is below average total cost,
average total cost trends down,
and then hits a minimum point
where marginal cost intersects it,
and then it starts to trend up
as marginal cost is higher than that.
And the demand curve for
a monopoly looks familiar.
When the prices are high,
if the prices on the hotel
rooms per night are high,
very few people will demand them,
and if the prices are low, a
lot of folks would demand them.
Now something that we've
talked about in a lot of detail
in other videos is how
the marginal revenue curve
is different than the
demand curve for a monopoly.
And that's because, if you
were to charge a price of,
let's say, $500 per room,
you might be able to get one
room rented out for the night
but no other rooms.
And if you wanted to get
two rooms rented out,
well, you would have to charge
$400, not just for that room.
So now we'd get a little bit
further down this demand curve.
When you charge $400 maybe
for that second room,
because someone's
willingness to pay is $400.
Well you might have to also
charge $400 for that first room.
So in many monopoly industries,
whatever you charge to one consumer,
you have to charge to other consumers.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking,
hey, that doesn't always
happen in a hotel,
and that's why I picked this example.
Because we're going to
look at the situation
where one, you do have to
charge the same to everyone,
and then we'll look at another situation
known as price discrimination,
where you don't have to
charge the same to everyone.
But let's just go with the model
where you do have to change
the same to everyone.
So when you go from one room
at 500 to two rooms at 400,
your marginal revenue
isn't the incremental 400,
because this 500 is now 400 as well.
So you go from 500 to 800,
so your marginal revenue
is an incremental 300,
as you go from 500 total
to 400 plus 400 or 800 total.
And that's why, and we go
into significant detail
in other videos on this,
and we do it with tables of numbers,
and I encourage you to do that.
That is why your marginal
revenue curve for a monopoly
has twice the slope, the negative slope,
than your demand curve would have.
So your marginal revenue curve
would look something like this.
And we've already talked
about it in multiple videos,
for any firm, it's rational
to produce the quantity
where marginal cost is
equal to a marginal revenue.
So this monopoly would
produce this quantity,
and the price they would get,
well, that quantity, we go
to look at the demand curve.
The price would be right over there.
So this monopoly firm would
be able to get that price,
and we can think about what
its economic profit would be.
On every room in this case,
it charges that price.
And its average total cost
is this blue line right over here.
So its average total cost are there,
so the difference is how much
economic profit per room,
and then you multiply that
times the total number of rooms,
and so this area is the
firms economic profit.
Now, there is still some
consumer surplus here.
This is benefit that consumers are getting
above and beyond what
they're paying for it.
So the consumer surplus in this situation
would be all of this.
So that first person who's willing
to pay maybe $500 per room is now able
to get this market price
that everyone is able to get,
which is maybe $300 per room,
and so this benefit for that one unit,
it goes to the consumer.
And we've also seen that there
is dead weight loss here.
Your allocatively efficient
when marginal cost
is equal to the demand curve,
and so, we study that in other videos.
This right over here is
our dead weight loss.
But now let's imagine the other scenario.
Let's say that we are a hotel,
where we try to capture as
much of someone's willingness
to pay as possible.
And I'll give a little bit
of a idealistic scenario
that doesn't really
exist in the real world,
but just to look at an extreme case.
Let's say that you were
able to get a computer
that can read people's minds,
and every time they call
for a quote on a room,
you know exactly what their
willingness to pay is.
So if I call, the computer says,
hey, Sal's willingness to
pay for that room is $375.
So you quote me, all right $375,
and I say, okay, sure.
And then when that first person
who has a high willingness to pay calls,
it says, okay, why don't
we quote them $500?
And so we quote them $500,
and so they get that room.
And so in that situation,
every incremental room,
you don't have to change the
prices on all the other ones
causing this marginal revenue
curve to slope down faster.
Instead, every incremental room,
you get those dollars.
And so in that situation,
your demand curve is equal to
your marginal revenue curve.
You're able to discriminate on prices.
Let me write this.
This is price discrimination.
You're able to charge,
and price discrimination
is a general term for
charging different customers,
different consumers different rates,
ideally based on their willingness to pay,
and it might sound bad.
In normal life, we don't like
discriminating against others,
but price discrimination
is a very legitimate thing,
and actually you will see it happen
in things like the hotel industry,
where they're going to try
to charge different prices
to different people based
on their willingness to pay
for essentially the same room.
If you go stay in a hotel,
it's very likely that the person
in an identical room next to
you is paying a different rate.
Airlines will also do it.
Now they're not going to be
able to do it as perfectly
as I just described with
this magical computer,
but they'll do it where,
depending on how far ahead
or whether you can return the ticket
or cancel your reservation,
you can get a different price,
and the prices change over time.
And so they're trying to capture as much
of consumer's willingness
to pay as possible.
But if we took this extreme situation
where you're able to charge exactly
everyone their willingness to pay,
well then, what is going
to be the rational quantity
for this profit maximizing
monopoly to produce?
Well, once again, it would be
where marginal cost
intersects marginal revenue,
but the marginal revenue
curve is now the demand curve.
So it'd be right over there.
That's the quantity that
this monopoly would produce.
And then, what's the price it would get?
Pause this video and think about that.
Well, you might be tempted
to just go horizontally here
and say, okay, this is
the price it would get,
like we did here.
But remember, it's able
to get a different price
for every consumer.
So there isn't just one price,
like in this first example,
that everyone is paying.
So we can see the
quantity it is producing.
You can see the average
total cost at that quantity,
but the profit per room
is going to be dependent
on what people are willing to pay.
This first person is
going to pay a lot for it.
They're not going to
get any consumer surplus
in this extreme example,
and so all of this is going
to accrue to the firm,
and that's going to be the case
for all of these consumers
in this extreme circumstance.
And so now, you have a
fascinating situation.
Notice, when this monopoly firm
is able to do price discrimination,
now, it's economic profit is far larger,
economic profit.
The consumer surplus shrunk
through price discrimination.
In the extreme example, it disappeared.
But you also see that this
is actually allocatively efficient.
That we are actually
producing at a quantity
where marginal cost is
equal to marginal revenue.
