Recent literature has addressed how product creation amplifies economic fluctuations via the love of variety. Yet, empirical evidence on variety effects is sparse. The current paper demonstrates that decreasing returns in variety-level production technology, which leads to increasing marginal costs, similarly amplify business cycles. Product scope expansions reduce costs and firms have an incen...

The effective cost management during the conceptual design phase of a product is essential to develop a product with minimum cost and desired quality. The integration of the methodologies of quality function deployment (QFD), value engineering (VE) and target costing (TC) could be applied to the continuous improvement of any product during product development. To optimize customer satisfaction ...