The firm and its objectives
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.
