Costing Relationship Between Production And Cost Theory

1351 Words3 Pages

An efficient allocation of resources is always attempted to be achieved. Whether it be by a household or a firm, both attempt to maximise the welfare benefits they receive from using the resources they have available to them. Production and cost theory enable firms to have a clearer picture of how their resources can be allocated, and therefore they are essential to an efficient allocation of resources. The production theory mainly focuses on the relationship between the inputs that a company will inject into the production process, and the outputs that will come out of it. Firms always look at decisions in at least two different time frames: the short run and the long run. In the short run firms have at least one fixed factor of production. …show more content…

These occur only in the long-run, and allow for a firm to know whether it would improve efficiency for them to increase input levels. Economies and diseconomies of scale occur due to the idea of increasing and decreasing returns to scale. Economies of scale are reasons as to why an increased inputs will lead to a more than proportional increase in outputs. External economies of scale are those which occur due to the benefits of being in a market (eg.if logistics links are improving due to a concentrated geographical market, then this is an external economy of scale) while internal economies of scale occur due to an increase in an individual firm 's size (eg.if two firms merge and therefore they have better specialized managers for individual departments, then this is called a managerial economy of scale). Diseconomies of scale, on the other hand, occur due to communications issues (eg.if a company has a decentralized management, it may not be able to control average costs from rising). Due to the concept of economies and diseconomies of scale, firms are able to better gauge whether they can efficiently grow so that they are achieving growth targets while also keeping costs at a level of productive efficiency. Using cost theory means that firms can predict the effect that changes in their inputs will have on their

Open Document