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Concept
Experience curve effects
Summary
In industry, models of the learning or experience curve effect express the relationship between experience producing a good and the efficiency of that production, specifically, efficiency gains that follow investment in the effort. The effect has large implications for costs and market share, which can increase competitive advantage over time.
Learning curve
An early empirical demonstration of learning curves was produced in 1885 by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus was investigating the difficulty of memorizing verbal stimuli. He found that performance increased in proportion to experience (practice and testing) on memorizing the word set. (More detail about the complex processes of learning are discussed in the Learning curve article.)
This was later more generalized to: the more times a task has been performed, the less time is required on each subsequent iteration. This relationship was probably first quantified in the industrial setting in 1936 by Theodore Paul Wright, an engineer at Curtiss-Wright in the United States. Wright found that every time total aircraft production doubled, the required labor time for a new aircraft fell by 20%. This has become known as "Wright's law". Studies in other industries have yielded different percentage values (ranging from only a couple of percent up to 30%), but in most cases, the value in each industry was a constant percentage and did not vary at different scales of operation. The learning curve model posits that for each doubling of the total quantity of items produced, costs decrease by a fixed proportion. Generally, the production of any good or service shows the learning curve or experience curve effect. Each time cumulative volume doubles, value-added costs (including administration, marketing, distribution, and manufacturing) fall by a constant percentage.
The phrase experience curve was proposed by Bruce D. Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), based on analyses of overall cost behavior in the 1960s.
Official source
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