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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Beyond Viner: Smoothed Cost Curves and Co-Detetermination of Output and Production Capacity

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description

We address two problems of traditional cost functions: the discontinuity caused by the production capacity (the marginal cost abruptly becomes infinite when production capacity is reached) and the production capacity is artificially exogenous. So, we introduce a smoothed form of marginal cost function. It progressively tends to infinity when it approaches to the production capacity. Then, we prove that it is perfectly possible to determine directly output, fixed costs and production capacity simultaneously, even if this could lead to a system of equations that is not so elementary to solve because it includes a Lambert function. We also show that the smoothed cost function prevails in both the short and long run because the firm is always placed at the minimum of the average cost.