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Wiktionary
diminishing returns

n. (context idiomatic English) A condition in which additional inputs into an organization, project or process produce progressively fewer or lower-quality additional outputs, and may, in extreme cases, cause the total quantity or quality of outputs to decrease.

Wikipedia
Diminishing returns

In economics, diminishing returns (also called law of diminishing returns, law of variable proportions, principle of diminishing marginal productivity, or diminishing marginal returns) is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.

The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant (" ceteris paribus"), will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns. The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common.

A common sort of example is adding more workers to a job, such as assembling a car on a factory floor. At some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other's way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively.

The law of diminishing returns is a fundamental principle of economics. It plays a central role in production theory.

Usage examples of "diminishing returns".

First, we must study the energy and personnel parameters for critical technologies, balance the input and output against the wastes and other diseconomies, and then pinpoint areas of diminishing returns, where the use of more high technology may not produce commensurate benefits.

That, together with the fact that the number of operational U-boats in that same grim year rose from 91 to 212 made it certain that, by the law of diminishing returns, the British Merchant Navy would eventually cease to exist unless a miracle occurred.

Terrors were a useful goad, but the law of diminishing returns pertained.

Lowbock blinked at her, feigning innocence long past the point of diminishing returns.

A jumpship is certainly an example of diminishing returns for a small system.

Then the rest of it came clear, for the total ring system is enormous, extending out some eight times the radius of the planet, and fading only as a matter of diminishing returns.

Ninety-eight percent, he guessed, would be about the point where a law of diminishing returns set in and the Implacable equations of relativity demanded the expenditure of impossible amounts of energy to attain infinitesimal increments of velocity.

Ninety-eight percent, he guessed, would be about the point where a law of diminishing returns set in and the implacable equations of relativity demanded the expenditure of impossible amounts of energy to attain infinitesimal increments of velocity.

Even those who don't expect a slowing up at once tend to expect us to reach a point of diminishing returns (dotted line number two).

But the proper way to project the curve is dotted line number four-for there is no reason, mathematical, scientific, or historical, to expect that curve to flatten out, or to reach a point of diminishing returns, or simply to go on as a tangent.

But the proper way to project the curve is dotted line number four - for there is no reason, mathematical, scientific, or historical, to expect that curve to flatten out, or to reach a point of diminishing returns, or simply to go on as a tangent.