- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
Selling state-owned businesses to private investors. This policy was associated initially with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, which privatized numerous companies, including public utility businesses such as British Telecom, British Gas, and electricity and water companies. During the 1990s, privatization became a favorite policy of governments all over the world. There were several reasons for the popularity of privatization. In some instances, the aim was to improve the performance of publicly owned companies. Often nationalization had failed to achieve its goals and had become increasingly associated with poor service to customers. Sometimes privatization was part of transforming a state-owned monopoly into a competitive market, by combining ownership transfer with deregulation and liberalization. Sometimes privatization offered a way to raise new capital for the firm to invest in improving its service, money that was not available in the public sector because of constraints on public spending. Indeed, perhaps the main attraction of privatization to many politicians was that the proceeds from it could ease the pressure on the public purse. As a result, they could avoid (in the short-term) doing the more painful things necessary to improve the fiscal position, such as raising taxes or cutting public spending.
Industry:Economy
When a firm’s shares are held privately and not traded in the public markets. Private equity includes shares in both mature private companies and, as venture capital, in newly started businesses. As it is less liquid than publicly traded equity, investors in private equity expect on average to earn a higher equity risk premium from it.
Industry:Economy
A favorite example in game theory, which shows why co-operation is difficult to achieve even when it is mutually beneficial. Two prisoners have been arrested for the same offence and are held in different cells. Each has two options: confess, or say nothing. There are three possible outcomes. One could confess and agree to testify against the other as state witness, receiving a light sentence while his fellow prisoner receives a heavy sentence. They can both say nothing and may be lucky and get light sentences or even be let off, owing to lack of firm evidence. Or they may both confess and probably get lighter individual sentences than one would have received had he said nothing and the other had testified against him. The second outcome would be the best for both prisoners. However, the risk that the other might confess and turn state witness is likely to encourage both to confess, landing both with sentences that they might have avoided had they been able to co-operate in remaining silent. In an oligopoly, firms often behave like these prisoners, not setting prices as high as they could do if they only trusted the other firms not to undercut them. As a result, they are worse off.
Industry:Economy
A crude method of judging whether shares are cheap or expensive; the ratio of the market price of a share to the company’s earnings (profit) per share. The higher the price/earnings (P/E) ratio, the more investors are buying a company’s shares in the expectation that it will make larger profits in future than now. In other words, the higher the P/E ratio, the more optimistic investors are being.
Industry:Economy
When prices of, say, a public utility are regulated, giving producers an incentive to maximize their profits by reducing their costs as much as possible. Contrast with rate of return regulation.
Industry:Economy
Price mechanism is an economic term that refers to the buyers and sellers who negotiate prices of goods or services depending on demand and supply. A price mechanism or market-based mechanism refers to a wide variety of ways to match up buyers and sellers through price rationing.
Industry:Economy
A measure of the responsiveness of demand to a change in price. If demand changes by more than the price has changed, the good is price-elastic. If demand changes by less than the price, it is price-inelastic. Economists also measure the elasticity of demand to changes in the income of consumers.
Industry:Economy
In equilibrium, what balances supply and demand. The price charged for something depends on the tastes, income and elasticity of demand of customers. It depends on the amount of competition in the market. Under perfect competition, all firms are price takers. Where there is a monopoly, or firms have some market power, the seller has some control over the price, which will probably be higher than in a perfectly competitive market. By how much more will depend on how much market power there is, and on whether the firm(s) with the market power are committed to profit maximization. In some cases, firms may charge less than the profit-maximizing price for strategic or other reasons (see predatory pricing).
Industry:Economy
When a firm charges different customers different prices for the same product. For producers, the perfect world would be one in which they could charge each customer a different price: the price that each customer would be willing to pay. This would maximize producer surplus. This cannot happen, not least because sellers do not know how much any individual would pay. Yet some price discrimination is possible if an overall market can be segmented into somewhat separate markets and the equilibrium price in each of these markets is different, perhaps because of differences in consumer tastes, perhaps because in some segments the firm enjoys some market power. But this will work only if the market segments can be kept apart. If it is possible and profitable to buy the product in a low-price segment and resell it in a high-price segment, then price discrimination will not last for long.
Industry:Economy
Charging low prices now so you can charge much higher prices later. The predator charges so little that it may sustain losses over a period of time, in the hope that its rivals will be driven out of business. Clearly, this strategy makes sense only if the predatory firm is able eventually to establish a monopoly. Some advocates of anti-dumping policies say that cheap imports are examples of predatory pricing. In practice, the evidence gives little support for this view. Indeed, in general, predatory pricing is quite rare. It is certainly much less common in practice than it might appear from the propaganda of firms that are under pricing pressure from more efficient competitors.
Industry:Economy
