Test 2 Flashcards
Corporate level strategies are actions firms take to gain competitive advantages in a single market or industry.
f
Cost leadership and product differentiation are so widely recognized that they are often called generic business strategies.
t
A firm that chooses a cost-leadership business strategy focuses on gaining advantages by reducing its costs to a level equal to all of its competitors.
f
Firms that are successful in pursuing a cost-leadership strategy focus solely on keeping costs low and abandoning other business or corporate strategies.
f
In general, cost advantages are not possible when competing firms produce similar products.
f
Economies of scale are said to exist when the increase in firm size (measured in terms of volume of production) are associated with lower costs (measured in terms of average costs per unit of production).
t
As the volume of production in a firm increases, the average cost per unit decreases until some optimal volume of production is reached, after which the average costs per unit of production begin to rise because of diseconomies of scale.
t
When a firm has high levels of production, it is often able to purchase and use manufacturing tools that cannot be kept in operation in small firms.
t
The link between volume of production and the cost of building manufacturing operations is particularly important in industries characterized by product manufacturing, such as chemical and oil refining
f
High volumes of production are also associated with high levels of generality in employee tasks and as workers become increasingly generalized in accomplishing a variety of tasks, they can become more effective at these tasks, thereby reducing the firm’s costs.
f
There are physical limitations to the size of some manufacturing processes and when this size is exceeded, diseconomies of scale are experienced.
t
) As a firm increases in size, it often increases in complexity; however, the ability of managers to control and operate the firm efficiently are virtually unlimited and therefore costs do not substantially increase.
f
Increased worker specialization associated with higher levels of production can lead to worker de-motivation and diseconomies of scale.
t
Large transportation costs can offset cost reductions attributable to the exploitation of economies of scale in manufacturing.
t
The link between cumulative volumes of production and cost has been formalized in the concept of the learning curve.
t
Economies of scale focus on the relationship between the cumulative volume of production and average unit costs, while the learning curve focuses on the relationship between the volume of production at a given time and average unit costs.
f
If a firm gets too large, it will eventually experience both diseconomies of scale and an increase in costs associated with the learning-curve effect as cumulative volume of production grows.
f
Learning curve-cost advantages are restricted solely to manufacturing and the advantage associated only with the manufacturing business function.
f
Efforts to move down the learning curve quickly by acquiring market share are likely to generate only normal economic performance.
t
Differential low-cost access to productive inputs may create cost differences among firms producing similar products in an industry.
t
Productive inputs are any supplies used by a firm in conducting its business activities.
t
One of the least important productive inputs in almost all companies is labor and it is unlikely that differential low cost access to labor can give a firm a cost advantage.
f
Physical technology-based cost advantages apply only in manufacturing firms.
f
Technological software includes things like the quality of relations among labor and management, an organization’s culture, and the quality of managerial controls.
t