What is the Demand Schedule?

The demand may be defined as the amount of some product a consumer is willing and able to purchase at each price where;

The price is what a buyer pays for a specific good or service per unit.

The willingness to purchase suggests a desire, based on what economists call tastes and preferences.

 Being able to purchase suggests that income is important.

A demand schedule is a table that shows how much of a good or service consumers are willing to buy at different prices. It’s a tool used in economic analysis to understand how consumer behavior changes in response to price changes. The demand schedule appears in a tabular statement showing various quantities of commodities in demand at different price levels at a specific period. It will show the exact number of units of goods and services bought at each price over time.

The law of demand says that a higher price leads to a lower quantity demanded and that a lower price leads to a higher quantity demanded.

The following tabular statement is an example of a demand schedule.

The above table illustrates how consumer demand defers on quantity at different price levels.  

In a typical graphical representation of demand, price is on the y-axis and quantity is on the x-axis. The demand curve is downward sloping, illustrating the law of demand. This expresses the concept that as price increases, the quantity demanded decreases.

Demand schedules/ curves relate the prices and quantities demanded assuming other factors remain constant. This is called the ceteris paribus assumption. If you neither need nor want something, you will not buy it. So the demand schedule reflects based on changes in price and demand assuming no other factors change. Economists call this assumption of no other factors to change ceteris paribus, a Latin phrase meaning “other things being equal”.

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