In economics, a cost curve is a graph of the costs of production as a function of total quantity produced. In a free market economy, productively efficient firms use these curves to find the optimal point of production (minimising cost), and profit maximizing firms can use them to decide output quantities to achieve those aims. There are various types of cost curves, all related to each other, including total and average cost curves, and marginal ("for each additional unit") cost curves, which are the equal to the differential of the total cost curves. Some are applicable to the short run, others to the long run.
Read more about Cost Curve: Short-run Average Variable Cost Curve (SRAVC), Short-run Average Total Cost Curve (SRATC or SRAC), Long-run Average Cost Curve (LRAC), Short-run Marginal Cost Curve (SRMC), Long-run Marginal Cost Curve (LRMC), Graphing Cost Curves Together, Cost Curves and Production Functions, Relationship Between Different Curves, Relationship Between Short Run and Long Run Cost Curves, U-shaped Curves
Famous quotes containing the words cost and/or curve:
“I acknowledge that the balance I have achieved between work and family roles comes at a cost, and every day I must weigh whether I live with that cost happily or guiltily, or whether some other lifestyle entails trade-offs I might accept more readily. It is always my choice: to change what I cannot tolerate, or tolerate what I cannot—or will not—change.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty.... Here was every sensuous curve of the “human figure divine” but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.”
—Edward Weston (1886–1958)