Wiktionary
n. 1 The tendency for a continuing effort toward a particular goal to decline in effectiveness after a certain amount of success has been achieved. 2 (context economics English) A relationship between input and output, such that adding units of any one input (labour, capital etc.) to fixed amounts of the others will yield successively smaller increments of output.
WordNet
n. a law affirming that to continue after a certain level of performance has been reached will result in a decline in effectiveness
Usage examples of "law of diminishing returns".
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.
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.
There is a fallacy there, since one soon runs into a law of diminishing returns.
At that point, the law of diminishing returns sets in or the noise factor begins to overbalance the information, take your choice and the observer is reduced to traveling in time at the same old speed.
The law of diminishing returns would only have set in from this point on.
Plus, they get better at surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing returns.
The pigeon expended far less energy coasting around at a safe height than he did flinging his arm hectically about, and he realized that a law of diminishing returns would soon set in on this point.
The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.