产品差异化与企业开展-外文翻译 外文翻译原文 Title: PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION AND ECONOMICPROGRESS Material Source: THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS 12 Author: RANDALL G. HOLCOMBE In neoclassical theory, product differentiation provides consumers with a variety of different products within a particular industry, rather than a homogeneous product that characterize spurely competitive markets. In reality, firms do not differentiate their products to make them different, or to give consumers variety, but to make them better, so consumers would rather buy that firms product rather than the product of a competitor. When product differentiation is seen as a strategy to improve products rather than just to make them different, product differentiation emerges as the engine of economic progress. In contrast to theneo classical framework, where product differentiation imposes a cost on the economy in exchange for more product variety, in reality product differentiation lowers costs, creates better products for consumers, and generates economic progress. The profit-imizing srategy that neoclassical theory describes for competitive firms will not imize firm profits in a real-world competitive environment. Seeking economic profits by gaining market power is the profit-imizing competitive strategy. Product differentiation refers to the products features, performance, consistency, durability, reliability, repair of, style and design differences. That is an enterprise of products, quality, performance was significantly better than similar products manufacturer, to form own market. Competitors for the same industry, the product is basically the same core values, the difference is in performance and quality, to meet the basic needs of the customer situation, to provide customers with unique product differentiation strategy is the goal This has been recognized in managerial economics textbooks at least since Porter1980, but product differentiation as a competitive strategy has not migrated into the mainstream of neoclassical microeconomics. Managerial economics focuses on profit-imizing strategies for firms rather than on implications for the economy as a whole. In microeconomic theory textbooks, pure competition, which is the market structure that imizes social welfare, rules out product differentiation by assumption. Neoclassical economics recognizes the advantages of product variety that product differentiation brings with it but also argues that markets with differentiated products do not produce at minimum average total cost. There is a trade-off of higher cost for more variety. But this literature looks at product differentiation in a static framework, ignoring a larger advantage of product differentiation: it brings with it improvements in products that generate economic progress. In the real world, product differentiation results in innovation, which generates economic progress and leads to lower average costs, not higher ones, as the neo-classical model indicates. While it is true that the product variety generated by product differentiation increases welfare, the economic progress that results from product differentiation is much more important to The main point of this paper, as its title indicates, is that product differentiation is the engine of economic progress. The paper begins by recognizing, along with the standard literature, the benefit of greater variety that product differentiation brings. It then demonstrates that product differentiation is an essential strategy for firms in competitive markets. The key argument is that product differentiation improves the quality of products offered to consumers, lowers the cost of production, and generates economic progress PROFIT IMIZATION AND MARKET STRUCTUREIN THE NEOCLASSICAL FRAMEWORK In the neoclassical theory of the firm, firms are run by managers who imize profits by finding the optimal combination of inputs and producing the optimal quantity of output. The firms production function is given as QfK,L, and the firms only task is choosing the correct quantities of K and L. Pindyck and Rubinfeld 2005, p. 265 say, “To imize profit, the firm selects the output for which the difference between revenue and cost is the greatest. After explaining short-run profit imization in detail, Pindyck and Rubinfeld 2005, p. 282 discuss long-run profit imization, noting that “the long-run output of a profit-imizing competitive firm is the point at which long-run marginal cost equals the price.3 Besanko and Breautigam 2005, p. 305 echo Pindyckand Rubinfeld, saying, “a price-taking firm imizes its profit when it produces a quantity Q* at which the marginal cost equals the market price. Note that Besanko and Breautigam refer to the firm as a price-taker, in contrast to Pindyck and Rubinfelds characterization of a competitive firm. Pindyck and Rubinfeld further note 2005, p. 283 that “in competitive markets economic profit