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A little person in a large market can't move the price very much. You know the reason. If Farmer Brown is one of a million growers of corn then even if she, say, doubled the amount of corn she grew, or cut it in half, nothing much would happen to the market price. As we economists say, the elasticity of the demand curve facing Brown is "infinite' (all right: very high). A big change in her personal quantity supplied pushes around the going market price not at all (all right: very little).
I first got clear the notion that a supplier "faces" a personal demand curve, and that the elasticity of that demand curve just is his market power, as a junior in college, taking micro from an aged and terminally ill Edward Chamberlain, he of The Theory of Monopolisic Competition. But I didn't get it utterly, mathematically clear until I read the footnotes in the 3rd edition of George Stigler's The Theory of Price, while teaching the stuff to grad students at Chicago ten years later. I was that way in economics: a slow learner, not a natural. (I am proud to be one of Chamberlain's last students, if a slow one; it's always bothered me, though, that the final, utter clarity came from Stigler, a man whose scientific method and grasp of economic thought, not to speak of his humanity, were so defective.)
As an economist you know the Chamberlainian and Stiglerian reasoning. (It would please neither of them to be linked this way: in those days Harvard monopolistic competition was arrayed against Chicago School competition, "realism" against "perfect competition"; perfection won.) You want to know the elasticity of demand facing Farmer Brown; or, to invert the number,...