Competition Maximizes Economic Well-Being: The closing section of this chapter defines consumer and producer surplus and illustrates the famous result that the sum of these two measures (economic welfare) is maximized in a perfectly competitive market.  This is a very important result and, as the authors point out, one of the most misunderstood.  It is just as important to discuss the situations in which free markets do not lead to welfare maximization as it is to understand how and why they do in some cases.