As we have seen, a firm's success in a market economy depends on satisfying customers by producing the products they want and selling those goods and services at prices that meet the competition they face from other businesses. Doing that requires firms to develop careful answers to one of the most important questions every economic system faces: how can a society produce goods and services most efficiently? In a market economy, that means getting the greatest value of output from the inputs producers use.

To Build a Bicycle
Let's take the case of a firm that is considering the manufacture and sale of bicycles. Before launching such a venture, any entrepreneur or company has to consider a host of factors. First, what is the potential size and nature of consumer demand for a new brand of bicycle? Is there a single, large market for standard model bicycles? Or is the bicycle market divided into many smaller markets, or niches, for specialized bicycles for children, customized racing bikes, or bicycles built for two? A new trend, such as the sudden popularity of so-called mountain bikes that can handle wilderness trails, might also attract new manufacturers who see an opportunity to make a profit. On the other hand, prospective suppliers may simply feel that they have developed innovative manufacturing techniques for a standard bicycle, or possess significantly lower labor costs, so that the company can undersell their rivals in the marketplace and still make a profit.

Not only are there many kinds of bikes to make, but there are many ways to make these bicycles -- from using a highly automated assembly line to stamp out thousands of identical parts and put the bikes together, to using more labor and much less machinery to design and make customized bikes. Once again, the firm making these decisions in a market economy has to consider several different prices that may rise or fall in response to the behavior of people who buy and sell those products.

For example, the prices the firm has to pay for its inputs will obviously play a major role in determining how much steel, aluminum, labor, machinery, and other materials the firm will use in making its bicycles. If the price of steel rises and the price of aluminum falls, many bicycle firms will look for ways to use more aluminum and less steel. Similarly, if wages for workers rise sharply, firms will have a strong incentive to look for ways to use more machinery, or capital, and less labor. A firm might decide to buy more forklifts, for example, using fewer workers to move its inventory around the company's warehouses. Or it might use more machines to make routine and repetitive welds on its bikes, and thus hire fewer workers to do welding jobs. (As a consequence, the number of workers in factories producing the welding machinery used by the bicycle manufacturers would increase.)

Any such venture carries a large element of risk: a new bicycle design may fail to attract customers, or manufacturing costs may be unexpectedly high, pricing the company's bikes out of the market. Companies alone bear this risk of failure -- and reap the economic rewards of success if they have planned correctly and their bicycle venture succeeds.

This balancing of risk and rewards by individuals and private companies points to an essential role of government in any market economy: protecting private property rights and enforcing a law of contracts. Property rights must be well-defined legally, and business owners and investors must be treated the same by the law and commercial regulations whether they are citizens of the country or foreign nationals.

Only if property rights are free from the threat of expropriation by government, or exploitation by political interests, will individuals and companies be willing to risk their money by investing in new or expanded businesses. Moreover, they must be assured that the state's legal system will settle disputes over contract terms in a fair and consistent manner.

In short, entrepreneurs, whether domestic or foreign, must be willing to face economic uncertainty in their ventures -- but should not have to face political or legal uncertainty about the legitimacy of their enterprise.

Competition and Productivity
Making these adjustments as the prices for a firm's inputs change is an important part of what it means to produce efficiently and to compete with other firms making similar products. Companies that don't hold their production costs down may try to charge a higher price for their products; but that just won't work if other firms can make the same quality products at a lower cost and sell them at a lower price.

Consumers benefit from this competition among firms because they get better products at lower prices. And if most goods and services they buy are made in markets characterized by a high degree of competition, their budgets will go further and allow them to buy more products with the income they receive.

Even in competitive markets, however, not all firms will choose to use exactly the same materials or production methods. In many cases, that will reflect the different kinds of bicycles or other products they choose to make. For example, firms making a very basic bike for young children to ride or for adults who use the bikes as daily transportation to and from work will very likely want to make a large number of identical bicycles and put them together using standardized materials and assembly line methods that keep production costs and prices very low. On the other hand, companies specializing in customized racing bikes are likely to use more labor, special design tools, and more expensive metals, but use fewer stamping machines and assembly lines making identical parts. Not surprisingly, prices for the customized bikes will usually be higher than prices for the bikes that are mass produced in large factories.

Ideally, of course, everyone would like to have all of the things they buy face sharp competition -- thereby holding those prices down -- but face little or no competition from others in what they do to earn their own income -- so that their wages will remain high. More generally, everyone seems to favor the idea of high wages and low production costs (including labor costs, which are most firms' largest expense), because that seems to imply that everyone will be able to afford to buy more goods and services. But no economic system can provide high wages and low prices at the same time, because workers' wages represent a company's labor cost in making and selling the goods and services it produces. In other words, as long as other costs and demand remain unchanged, raising everyone's wages simply raises production costs and product prices.

Over time, however, there are ways for workers and firms to resolve this dilemma -- that is, to earn higher wages and profits without driving up the prices consumers pay for products and thereby risk losing their jobs or sales to competitors. The answer is to increase productivity, the level of output that an industry or company achieves from each worker or each unit of input into its products and services. To increase productivity, workers and firms must develop new products for the marketplace or produce goods and services more efficiently than the competition, at a lower cost, or with better quality. In short, their products must be newer, better, or cheaper.

Higher production levels justify higher wages and living standards. Higher productivity means higher output per worker, which translates into greater prosperity that can be shared through higher wages and a better standard of living. Cutting costs and working more efficiently are ways of increasing productivity, but in modern technology-based economies, research and innovation are critical to the sustained productivity and growth of a nation's and the world's economy. Advances in computers, telecommunications, and biogenetics are the result of scientific research, experimentation, and testing. These advances occur continuously in market economies as companies seek to develop new products and services, or to produce existing ones more efficiently. The result: new jobs, expanding opportunity, and greater prosperity for all. This, too, is the same way all workers and businesses in a country can improve their competitive position in the world economy, to raise the material living standards in their nation over time.

International trade can make an important contribution to productivity and prosperity as well. Think for a moment of Robert and Maria shopping for oranges. Robert is a machinist, skilled and experienced in what he does. Suppose that instead of working fulltime as a machinist, Robert had to devote some of his time to growing oranges -- and the orchard owner, who has grown oranges and other tree crops for years, had to spend time making machine tools. Neither would be as productive and efficient in his secondary job as in his primary work. The result would be predictable: fewer oranges and lower-quality machine tools for everyone. Just as two people are both made better off when they buy and sell from each other and specialize in the production of the things they do best and most efficiently, so too are regions and nations better off when they can specialize and trade freely with each other. When nations trade in the goods and services they make well and at low cost, the benefits accrue to the people in all the countries involved.

The most popular arguments calling for policies that limit free trade -- usually taxes on imported goods or limits on their amounts -- claim that protecting jobs in some industries is good for a country because the workers and owners in those industries will earn higher wages and profits and spend most of that money in their own country. This claim has an element of truth, but it is only part of the story. Protecting some producers and workers also means that prices for the goods and services they make will be higher. This is bad news for consumers, for other producers who use those products as inputs, and for firms that find their sales falling because some of their customers paid more for the protected products.