In a market system, if firms in an industry persistently earn total revenues that are less than total costs, then that industry will

I would say that in this situation if the revenue of a company is consistently less than its costs, then that company or industry will fail which may be due to the market conditions which was the case in the mining industry recently from 2013-2017 in which many mineral exploration companies or mining companies could not survive. On the other hand, an industry may be doing something wrong internally which affects its production and so require investigation as to why poor results were being obtained. A large mine I worked at increased its' blasthole diameter and noticed a significant drop in tonnes milled. A reduction of the diameter back to a previous diameter resulted in about  16% increase in milling rate which made a big improvement to profitability.

You can tell by just looking at it