 We've been looking at your imaginary career as the owner of a chicken fast-food outlet and Analyzing your supply packets with the help of your own supply curve, but you're not alone. You've got competition There are other people supplying fried chicken too, and if we look at you all together We get an understanding of the market supply In the same way we derive market demand to get the market supply curve We simply add all the individual suppliers together From this we can derive our market supply table The amounts produced at the various prices by each supplier are added together to give us the quantity supplied by the whole market Using these values we can now plot the market supply curve Showing the total quantities of a good or service that all suppliers will produce at each possible price The market supply curve has the same properties as the individual supply curve It's upward sloping showing that an increase in the price Increases the quantity supplied and a drop in the price decreases the quantity supplied a Movement along the supply curve reflects a change in quantity supplied caused by a change in price a Shift of the market supply curve occurs when factors other than price change This is referred to as a change in supply There are other factors which influence supply Let's consider the impact of an increase in the number of other suppliers As more suppliers enter the market at each price a higher quantity of fried chicken pieces is supplied than before Now is this represented by a movement along the supply curve or a shift of the supply curve itself? Well each supplier is still supplying the same quantity at each price But because there are more of them the overall market output increases Resulting in a shift of the supply curve In this case the supply curve shifts to the right at each price the market is now supplying more than before So to recap our supply equation now reads Supply is a positive function of the price px A rise in the price causes an increase in the quantity supplied and a movement up the supply curve takes place If the price falls we get a movement back down the curve There is a negative relationship between supply and the cost of production an increase in the cost of production Causes suppliers to produce less at each price So there's a leftward shift of the supply curve and the change in supply overall A drop in costs will cause a shift the other way An increase in the number of suppliers improvements in technology and an increase in expected price will also cause a rightward shift of the supply curve Simply remember a change in price means a change in the quantity supplied which is a movement along the curve While a change in any of the other factors causes a shift of the whole curve reflecting an overall change in supply