W hen you walk into a store, you are confronted with thousands of goods that
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the limit on the consumption bundles that a consumer can afford 65875_ch21_ptg01_433-460.indd 436 15/10/13 11:53 AM Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 21 the theOrY OF CONSUMer ChOICe 437 bundles that the consumer can afford. In this case, it shows the trade-off between pizza and Pepsi that the consumer faces. The slope of the budget constraint measures the rate at which the consumer can trade one good for the other. Recall that the slope between two points is calculated as the change in the vertical distance divided by the change in the hori- zontal distance (“rise over run”). From point A to point B, the vertical distance is 500 liters, and the horizontal distance is 100 pizzas. Thus, the slope is 5 liters per pizza. (Actually, because the budget constraint slopes downward, the slope is a negative number. But for our purposes we can ignore the minus sign.) Notice that the slope of the budget constraint equals the relative price of the two goods—the price of one good compared to the price of the other. A pizza costs five times as much as a liter of Pepsi, so the opportunity cost of a pizza is 5 liters of Pepsi. The budget constraint’s slope of 5 reflects the trade-off the market is offer- ing the consumer: 1 pizza for 5 liters of Pepsi. tải về 1.28 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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