We have now discussed the data which the firm needs for its decision-making—the demand for its products and the cost of supplying them. But, even with this information, in order to determine what decisions are optimal it is still necessary to find out the businessman's aims. The decision which best serves one set of goals will not usually be appropriate for some other set of aims.

1. Alternative Objectives of the Firm

There is no simple method for determining the goals of the firm (or of its executives). One thing, however, is clear. Very often the last person to ask about any individual's motivation is the person himself (as the psychoanalysts have so clearly shown). In fact, it is common experience when interviewing executives to find that they will agree to every plausible goal about which they are asked. They say they want to maximize sales and also to maximize profits; that they wish, in the bargain, to minimize costs; and so on. Unfortunately, it is normally impossible to serve all of such a multiplicity of goals at once.

For example, suppose an advertising outlay of half a million dollars minimizes unit costs, an outlay of 1.2 million maximizes total profits, whereas an outlay of 1.8 million maximizes the firm's sales volume. We cannot have all three decisions at once. The firm must settle on one of the three objectives or some compromise among them.

Of course, the businessman is not the only one who suffers from the desire to pursue a number of incompatible objectives. It is all too easy to try to embrace at one time all of the attractive-sounding goals one can muster and difficult to reject any one of them. Even the most learned have suffered from this difficulty. It is precisely on these grounds that one great economist was led to remark that the much-discussed objective of the greatest good for the greatest number contains one "greatest" too many.

It is most frequently assumed in economic analysis that the firm is trying to maximize its total profits. However, there is no reason to believe that all businessmen pursue the same objectives. For example, a small firm which is run by its owner may seek to maximize the proprietor's free time subject to the constraint that his earnings exceed some minimum level, and, indeed, there have been cases of overworked businessmen who, on medical advice, have turned down profitable business opportunities.

It has also been suggested, on the basis of some observation, that firms often seek to maximize the money value of their sales (their total revenue) subject to a constraint that their profits do not fall short of some minimum level which is just on the borderline of acceptability. That is, so long as profits are at a satisfactory level, management will devote the bulk of its energy and resources to the expansion of sales. Such a goal may, perhaps, be explained by the businessman's desire to maintain his competitive position, which is partly dependent on the sheer size of his enterprise, or it may be a matter of the interests of management (as distinguished from shareholders), since management's salaries may be related more closely to the size of the firm's operations than to its profits, or it may simply be a matter of prestige.

In any event, though they may help him to formulate his own aims and sometimes be able to show him that more ambitious goals are possible and relevant, it is not the job of the operations researcher or the economist to tell the businessman what his goals should be. Management's aims must be taken to be whatever they are, and the job of the analyst is to find the conclusions which follow from these objectives—that is, to describe what businessmen do to achieve these goals, and perhaps to prescribe methods for pursuing them more efficiently.

The major point, both in economic analysis and in operations-research investigation of business problems, is that the nature of the firm's objectives cannot be assumed in advance. It is important to determine the nature of the firm's objectives before proceeding to the formal model-building and the computations based on it. As is obviously to be expected, many of the conclusions of the analysis will vary with the choice of objective function. However, as some of the later discussion in this chapter will show, a change in objectives can, sometimes surprisingly, leave some significant relationships invariant. Where this is true, it is very convenient to find it out in advance before embarking on the investigation of a specific problem. For if there are some problems for which the optimum decision will be the same, no matter which of a number of objectives the firm happens to adopt, it is legitimate to avoid altogether the difficult job of determining company goals before undertaking an analysis.

2. The Profit-Maximizing Firm

Let us first examine some of the conventional theory of the profit-maximizing firm. In the chapter on the differential calculus, the basic marginal condition for profit maximization was derived as an illustration. Let us now rederive this marginal-cost-equals-marginal-revenue condition with the aid of a verbal and a geometric argument.

The proposition is that no firm can be earning maximum profits unless its marginal cost and its marginal revenue are (at least approximately) equal, i.e., unless an additional unit of output will bring in as much money as it costs to produce, so that its marginal profitability is zero.

It is easy to show why this must be so. Suppose a firm is producing 200,000 units of some item, x, and that at that output level, the marginal revenue from x production is $1.10 whereas its marginal cost is only 96 cents. Additional units of x will, therefore, each bring the firm some 14 cents = $1.10 — 0.96 more than they cost, and so the firm cannot be maximizing its profits by sticking to its 200,000 production level. Similarly, if the marginal cost of x exceeds its marginal revenue, the firm cannot be maximizing its profits, for it is neglecting to take advantage of its opportunity to save money—by reducing its output it would reduce its income, but it would reduce its costs by an even greater amount.

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