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Theory Of Production

In microeconomics, Production is quite simply the conversion of inputs into outputs. It is an economic process that uses resources to create a commodity that is suitable for exchange. This can include manufacturing, storing, shipping, and packaging. Some economists define production broadly as all economic activity other than consumption. They see every commercial activity other than the final purchase as some form of production.

Production is a process, and as such it occurs through time and space. Because it is a flow concept, production is measured as a “rate of output per period of time”. There are three aspects to production processes:

the quantity of the commodity produced,
the form of the good created,
the temporal and spatial distribution of the commodity produced.
A production process can be defined as any activity that increases the similarity between the pattern of demand for goods, and the quantity, form, and distribution of these goods available to the market place.

Contents
1 Efficiency and cross-efficiency
2 Factors of production
3 Total, average, and marginal product
4 Diminishing returns
5 Diminishing marginal returns
6 Many ways of expressing the production relationship
7 Isoquants
8 The marginal rate of technical substitution
9 External links


Efficiency and cross-efficiency
A production process is efficient if a given quantity of outputs cannot be produced with any less inputs. It is said to be inefficient when there exists another feasible process that, for any given output, uses less inputs. Some economists (in particular Leibenstein) use the term X-efficiency to indicate that production processes tend to be inherently inefficient due to satisficing behaviour. The “rate of efficiency” is simply the amount of (or value of) outputs divided by the amount of (or value of) inputs. If a production process uses 50 units of input (or $5000 worth of inputs) to produce one unit of output it is more efficient than...