Talk:Socially optimal firm size/Archive 1

Proposed deletion ?

This article was proposed for deletion with the reason stated that:

"Most of what this article contradicts accepted economic definitions and theory; the rest is so poorly written as to add no value."

1) This statement itself uses poor grammar (the word "what" is out of place), calling into question this person's ability to judge the quality of other writing. Please provide examples of poorly written material.

2) How does this article contradict accepted economic definitions ? Let's see some examples before deleting articles, please. StuRat (talk) 18:46, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Okay: (1) The lead sentence is (and was back in April 2011)

The ideal firm size is the theoretically most competitive size for any company, in a given industry, at a given time; which should ideally correspond with the highest possible per-unit profit.

The semi-colon should be a comma.

(2) The image caption says:

The diagram shows that as more is produced, and so long output OQ2 is not outweigh, economies of scale are obtained.

This has several problems: as is missing; "-ed" is missing; "outweigh[ed]" should be "exceeded".

But such problems are easily fixable, and I will do so. The larger problem is that the literature contains no accepted concept of "ideal firm size", so the title phrase is a neologism, and the article is original research and hence inappropriate for Wikipedia. There is a literature that may contain the term "optimal firm size", but that would refer to optimal in the sense of socially optimal rather than optimal from the firm's point of view, the latter being what this article refers to.

Moreover, the original research is nonsense. The first quoted passage above says which should ideally correspond with the highest possible per-unit profit. Nonsense. The theory of the firm has the firm maximizing total profit, not per-unit profit. If the firm is maximizing per-unit profit at a positive level, it could increase production, making additional profit on the additional units even while dragging down the average.

So the article should either be quickly revised to put in references to the concept (probably with a title change) and to correct the misconception, or it should be deleted. Duoduoduo (talk) 15:50, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

I've cleaned up the content to get rid of the original research that conflicted with established economics, and to put in something based on economic theory. Since the title "Ideal firm size" was a Wikipedia neologism, I've moved the page to "Socially optimal firm size". Duoduoduo (talk) 19:39, 26 August 2013 (UTC)