Supply and demand
Supply and demand is an economic model based on price and quantity in a market. It predicts that in a competitive market, price will function to equalize the quantity demanded by consumers, and the quantity supplied by producers, resulting in an economic equilibrium of price and quantity. The model incorporates other factors changing equilibrium as a shift of demand and/or supply. The supply schedule, graphically represented by the supply curve, is most often expressed by the relationship between market price and amount of goods produced. In short-run analysis, where some input variables are fixed, a positive slope can reflect the law of diminishing marginal returns, which states that beyond some level of output, additional units of output require larger amounts of input. In the long-run, where no input variables are fixed, a positively-sloped supply curve can reflect diseconomies of scale.