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:
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)