What is the Marginal Revenue Curve?
The marginal revenue curve shows the additional revenue gained from selling one more unit. As mentioned before, a firm in perfect competition faces a perfectly elastic demand curve for its product—that is, the firm’s demand curve is a horizontal line drawn at the market price level. This also means that the firm’s marginal revenue curve is the same as the firm’s demand curve: Every time a consumer demands one more unit, the firm sells one more unit and revenue increases by exactly the same amount equal to the market price.
This condition only holds for price taking firms in perfect competition where:
marginal revenue = price
Under perfect competition, marginal revenue does not change as the firm produces more output. That is because under perfect competition, the price is determined through the interaction of supply and demand in the market and does not change as the farmer produces more (keeping in mind that, due to the relative small size of each firm, increasing their supply has no impact on the total market supply where price is determined).
Since a perfectly competitive firm is a price taker, it can sell whatever quantity it wishes at the market-determined price. We calculate marginal cost, the cost per additional unit sold, by dividing the change in total cost by the change in quantity.
Ordinarily, marginal cost changes as the firm produces a greater quantity. At some point, though, marginal costs start to increase, displaying the typical pattern of diminishing marginal returns. If the firm is producing at a quantity where MR > MC then it can increase profit by increasing output because the marginal revenue is exceeding the marginal cost. If the firm is producing at a quantity where MC > MR then it can increase profit by reducing output because the reductions in marginal cost will exceed the reductions in marginal revenue. The firm’s profit-maximizing choice of output will occur where MR = MC (or at a choice close to that point).
The profit-maximizing choice for a perfectly competitive firm will occur at the level of output where marginal revenue is equal to marginal cost—that is, where MR = MC.
Because the marginal revenue received by a perfectly competitive firm is equal to the price P, we can also write the profit-maximizing rule for a perfectly competitive firm as a recommendation to produce at the quantity of output where P = MC.