Learning Team Reflection: Production and Cost Analysis
Heather Bosack, Iris Cost, Joey Piester, Jennifer Stephenson, and Girlean Taylor
ECO/365
February 11, 2013
Jeffrey Lesson

Learning Team Reflection: Production and Cost Analysis
For our team there were many different experiences that were share in reference to the objectives for this week. Girlean explained that she understood that productivity is the amount of goods and services being produced and that the cost of production is the expenses that occur during production of those goods and services. She also explained that these expenses include fixed cost, variable cost and total cost. The team member shared that she works in security where services are provided to banking institutions. The company has a type of monopoly where they contract other companies for security services and this monopoly has altered competition on the supply side. In this case, the prices are a fixed so that the company neither make nor lose money.

Jennifer shared how law of diminishing marginal productivity and the difference between fixed and variable cost both would be important to a big corporation such as Wal-Mart. At Wal-Mart headquarters managers from each location would look at the information to determine the schedule for each employee and how many employees would need to be working at a certain time. The managers would also need to look at all variables to change the cost of an item in a store. This team member shared that she looks at the prices of different items before buying them. Price matching is also another part of variable costs.

For Iris, being able to identify the relationship between the number of inputs and the law of diminishing marginal productivity was an interesting experience. She stated how the law of diminishing is the process of increasing one input while keeping all others constant will lead to