The firm and its objectives
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.
