Consider the following statements:
Statement 1: “The sum of consumer and producer surpluses is maximized under both monopoly and perfect competition.”
Statement 2: “All else being equal, a monopolist that practices price discrimination will be more allocatively efficient than a single-price monopolist.”
With respect to these statements:
Statement 1 is incorrect because the sum of consumer and producer surpluses is maximized under perfect competition when marginal benefit and marginal cost are equal, or equivalently, where the marginal cost curve intersects the demand curve. Monopolies, however, produce a quantity that is less than the quantity where marginal cost equals marginal benefit, so the sum of producer and consumer surpluses is not maximized. |