All Organisms, Including Humans, Exist Within a Thin Layer of Soil

question 8

Short Answer

All organisms, including humans, exist within a thin layer of soil, air and water that surrounds the earth. This environment is call the__________ .

Identify factors contributing to government failures such as rent-seeking behavior and special-interest effects.

Understand the concept of logrolling and its impact on government decisions.

Recognize the implications of the principal-agent problem in politics.

Comprehend how regulatory capture occurs and its effects.

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Definitions:

Normal Profit

The payment made by a firm to obtain and retain entrepreneurial ability; the minimum income that entrepreneurial ability must receive to induce entrepreneurs to provide their entrepreneurial ability to a firm; the level of accounting profit at which a firm generates an economic profit of zero after paying for entrepreneurial ability.

Implicit Cost

The monetary income a firm sacrifices when it uses a resource it owns rather than supplying the resource in the market; equal to what the resource could have earned in the best-paying alternative employment; includes a normal profit.

Law of Diminishing Returns

The economic principle stating that as one input variable is increased, there is a point at which the marginal gain in output begins to decrease, holding all other inputs constant.

Diseconomies of Scale

Diseconomies of scale occur when a firm's costs per unit increase as the scale of its output increases, often due to inefficiencies that arise from managing a larger organization.