Note: This is post #45 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics.

Industries that have a flat supply curve are called “constant cost” industries. An example is domain name registration: to increase the supply of domain names, we must only increase the inputs by a negligible amount. That is why even as the Internet expands so rapidly, says Alex Tabarrok, it still costs only about six or seven dollars to register a new domain name. By showing you how these industries respond to an increase in demand, we can explain why they are constant cost industries.

(If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times the speed. You can adjust the speed at which the video plays by clicking on “Settings” (the gear symbol) and changing “Speed” from normal to 1.25, 1.5 or 2.)

Previous in series:Entry, exit, and supply curves: Increasing Costs