A THEORY OF OLIGOPOLY 61 The loss from imposed uniformity is there- fore proportional to the ratio of alteration costs to price. Our example is sufficiently unrealistic to make any quantitative estimate uninteresting. In general one would expect an upper limit to the ratio alp, because it becomes cheaper to resort to other goods (custom tailoring in our example), or to abandon the attempt to find appropriate goods. The loss of profits of the monopolist will he proportional to the aver- age value of a/p, and this will be smaller, the smaller the variation in buyers' circumstances. Still, monopolists are lucky if their long-run demand curves have an elasticity only as large as -5, and then even a ratio of a to p of 1/40 will reduce their profits by 12 per cent. The gen- eral conclusion I wish to draw is that a mo- nopolist who does not cater to the diversities of his buyers' desires will suffer a substantial de- cline in his profit