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Published in: Intensive Care Medicine 8/2015

01-08-2015 | Editorial

Do you know how much it costs?

Author: Derek S. Wheeler

Published in: Intensive Care Medicine | Issue 8/2015

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Excerpt

Economics, as a scientific discipline, deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and is chiefly concerned with the allocation of scarce resources. From an economics standpoint, if something is scarce, it will have market value. There are two laws that every student of economics learns in the first week of the first class during the first year of their education. The first law, known very simply as the law of supply, states that, all other factors being equal, as the price of a good or service increases, the quantity of that good or service offered or sold by the suppliers of that good or service will increase. The second law (known as the law of demand) is just as elegant and states that, all other factors being equal, as the price of a good or service increases, consumer demand for that good or service will decrease. Importantly, in a perfectly competitive market, the equilibrium price of a good or service occurs at the point at which the quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal (i.e., at the point at which the downward-sloping demand curve and the upward-sloping supply curve intersect each other, see Fig. 1). In other words, if the supply of a good or service is low, the market price will rise, as long as there is sufficient demand from consumers. If there is excess supply of a good or service, the market price will fall. In a similar way, as long as there is sufficient supply of a good or service, if consumer demand for that good or service is low, the market price will fall. Conversely, if the demand of the good or service increases, the market price will rise.
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Metadata
Title
Do you know how much it costs?
Author
Derek S. Wheeler
Publication date
01-08-2015
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Intensive Care Medicine / Issue 8/2015
Print ISSN: 0342-4642
Electronic ISSN: 1432-1238
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00134-015-3911-1

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