February 2016
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
219h 58m
English
Most organizations learn and improve over time. As firms and employees perform a task over and over, they learn how to perform more efficiently. This means that task times and costs decrease.
Learning curves are based on the premise that people and organizations become better at their tasks as the tasks are repeated. A learning curve graph (illustrated in Figure E.1) displays cost (or time) per unit versus the cumulative number of units produced. From it we see that the time needed to produce a unit decreases, usually following a negative exponential curve (part a), as the person or company produces more units. In other words, it takes less time to complete each additional unit a firm produces. However, we also see in ...