Production theory is the study of production, or the economic process of converting inputs into outputs. Production uses resources to create a good or service that is suitable for use, gift-giving in a gift economy, or exchange in a market economy. 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 good or service produced,
- the form of the good or service created,
- the temporal and spatial distribution of the good or service produced.
A production process can be defined as any activity that increases the similarity between the pattern of demand for goods and services, and the quantity, form, shape, size, length and distribution of these goods and services available to the market place.
Read more about Production Theory: Factors of Production, Total, Average, and Marginal Product, Diminishing Returns, Diminishing Marginal Returns, Many Ways of Expressing The Production Relationship, Isoquants, The Marginal Rate of Technical Substitution
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or theory:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film, Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)