A single business or corporation is a producer, all producers in the market and industry, and the people and consumers to whom an industry plans to sell sell their products are the market. Supply is therefore simply the quantity of goods that producers, or that an industry is willing to sell at a specific price and at a given time. Then there is a law of supply which reflects a direct relationship between price and quantity supplied. All else being equal, the quantity supplied of an item increases as the price of that item increases. The supply curve represents the relationship between the price of the item and the quantity supplied. The quantity supplied to a market is simply the quantity that firms are willing to produce and sell now. A change in the quantity supplied is just a movement from one point to another on the supply curve. Conversely, the cause of a change in supply is a change in one of the supply determinants that shifts the curve either to the left or to the right. These determinants are resource prices, technology, taxes and subsidies, producers' expectations and the number of sellers. An equilibrium price is required to produce an equilibrium quantity and a price less than this amount is called the quantity supplied by no firm that engages in that particular activity. If the price coefficient is greater than zero, as the price of the product increases, firms want to produce more of that product. As the price of the product increases, it becomes more attractive for companies to redirect their resources toward producing that product. Therefore, the slope of a supply curve is the change in price divided by the change in quantity. The constant in this equation is something less (still a negative number) than zero because it strictly requires a positive middle of paper...... the amount of helium supplied has also decreased due to refinery closures and the privatization which is a determinant of supply known as “decreasing number of sellers”, which will cause an increase in helium prices. As the number of sellers in that particular market decreases, our supply of helium also decreases, which shifts the supply curve. Furthermore, we have a change in a non-price determinant of supply, such as factor cost of production, which is equivalent to a change in supply. This change in supply shifts the supply curve to the left as helium becomes increasingly difficult to find and the cost of natural resources has increased, causing the supply of helium to decrease. chromatography/1/parker_domnick_hunter_ltd/helium_supplies_are_diminishing_and_prices_are_rising/28930/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7yC-5IDhKM