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The term surplus is used in economics for several related quantities. The consumer surplus (sometimes named consumer's surplus or consumers' surplus) is the amount that consumers benefit by being able to purchase a product for a price that is less than the most that they would be willing to pay. The producer surplus is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a market price mechanism that is higher than the least that they would be willing to sell for.
Note that producer surplus generally flows through to the owners of the factors of production: in perfect competition, no producer surplus accrues to the individual firm. This is the same as saying that economic profit is driven to zero. Real-world businesses generally own or control some of their inputs, meaning that they receive the producer's surplus due to them: this is known as normal profit, and is a component of the firm's opportunity costs. If the markets for factors are perfectly competitive as well, producer surplus ultimately ends up as economic rent to the owners of scarce inputs such as land.



Overview

On a standard supply and demand (S&D) diagram, consumer surplus (CS) is the triangular area above the price level and below the demand curve, since intramarginal consumers are paying less for the item than the maximum that they would pay. In contrary, producer surplus (PS) is the triangular area below the price level and above the supply curve, since that is the minimum quantity a producer can produce.
If the government intervenes by implementing, for example, a tax or a subsidy, then the graph of supply and demand becomes more complicated and will also include an area that represents government surplus.
Combined, the consumer surplus, the producer surplus, and the government surplus (if present) make up the social surplus or the total surplus. Total surplus is the primary measure used in welfare economics to evaluate the efficiency of a proposed policy.
A basic technique of bargaining for both parties is to pretend that their surplus is less than it really is: sellers may argue that the price they ask hardly leaves them any profit, while customers may play down how eager they are to have the article.
In national accounts, operating surplus is roughly equal to distributed and undistributed pre-tax profit income, net of depreciation.
In some schools of heterodox economics, the economic surplus denotes the total income which the ruling class derives from its ownership of scarce factors of production, which is either reinvested or spent on consumption.
In Marxian economics, the term surplus may also refer to surplus value, surplus product and surplus labour.

Consumer surplus

The individual consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum total price a consumer would be willing to pay for the amount he buys and the actual total.If someone is willing to pay more than the actual price, their benefit in a transaction is how much they saved when they didn't pay that price. For example, a person is willing to pay a tremendous amount for water since he needs it to survive, however since there are competing suppliers of water he is able to purchase it for less than he is willing to pay. The difference between the two prices is the consumer surplus.
The maximum price a consumer would be willing to pay for a given amount is the sum of the maximum price he would be willing to pay for the first unit, the maximum additional price he would be willing to pay for the second unit, etc. Typically these prices are decreasing; in that case they are given by the individual demand curve. If these prices are first increasing and then decreasing there may be a non-zero amount with zero consumer surplus. The consumer would not buy an amount larger than zero and smaller than this amount because the consumer surplus would be negative. The maximum additional price a consumer would be willing to pay for each additional unit may also alternatingly be high and low, e.g. if he wants an even number of units, such as in the case of tickets he uses in pairs on dates. The lower values do not show up in the demand curve because they correspond to amounts the consumer does not buy, regardless of the price. For a given price the consumer buys the amount for which the consumer surplus is highest.
The aggregate consumers' surplus is the sum of the consumer's surplus for each individual consumer. This can be represented on the figure of the aggregate demand curve.