I don't believe that profit margins represent market efficiencies. In a perfect market, profit margins represent value perceived.
If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us.
Except that in a maximally competitive market, someone else would quickly come along and offer to sell you an equivalent product for $4, and then someone else comes along, etc. Competition always pushes prices towards the cost of production.
Of course, cost of production varies as well. In an idealized sense, the cost to produce a product is proportional to the amount produced (due to scarcity), whereas everyone in the market has some price limit below which they would want to buy the product. At a given price point, if the cost of producing an additional unit is below the highest price limit among people who wouldn't buy the product otherwise, it's a net gain for me to make the product and sell it to the person with that limit. Of course, at any price point, there's some people who want the product but not enough to pay that price, and some people who would happily pay more; but that's just the system working as intended.
The end result (in theory) is that every product eventually settles at a price point reflecting optimal resource allocation to production, plus some small profit margin to make the time spent on the transaction worthwhile.
If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us.
Except that in a maximally competitive market, someone else would quickly come along and offer to sell you an equivalent product for $4, and then someone else comes along, etc. Competition always pushes prices towards the cost of production.
Of course, cost of production varies as well. In an idealized sense, the cost to produce a product is proportional to the amount produced (due to scarcity), whereas everyone in the market has some price limit below which they would want to buy the product. At a given price point, if the cost of producing an additional unit is below the highest price limit among people who wouldn't buy the product otherwise, it's a net gain for me to make the product and sell it to the person with that limit. Of course, at any price point, there's some people who want the product but not enough to pay that price, and some people who would happily pay more; but that's just the system working as intended.
The end result (in theory) is that every product eventually settles at a price point reflecting optimal resource allocation to production, plus some small profit margin to make the time spent on the transaction worthwhile.
In practice, it's... a bit more complicated.