The first cook is going to have a high marginal product since he can run around and use as many parts of the kitchen as he can handle. In order to see why the diminishing marginal product of labor is so prevalent, consider a bunch of cooks working in a restaurant kitchen. As noted earlier, the marginal product of labor is depicted by the slope of a line tangent to the production function at a given quantity, and these lines will get flatter as the quantity of labor increases as long as a production function has the general shape of the one depicted above. This is illustrated by the production function above. Therefore, the production function will reach a point where the marginal product of labor decreases as the quantity of labor used increases. In other words, most production processes are such that they will reach a point where each additional worker brought in will not add as much to output as the one that came before. It's almost universally true that a production function will eventually show what is known as diminishing marginal product of labor. It should be clear from context which interpretation is being used. In some cases, however, marginal product might be defined as the incremental output that would be produced by the next unit of labor or next unit of capital. When defined this way, marginal products are interpreted as the incremental output produced by the last unit of labor used or the last unit of capital used. ![]() Marginal product of labor and marginal product of capital are defined as functions of the quantities of labor and capital, respectively, and the formulas above would correspond to the marginal product of labor at L 2 and a marginal product of capital at K 2. Similarly, the marginal product of capital is the change in output caused by a change in the amount of capital divided by that change in the amount of capital. Mathematically, the marginal product of labor is just the change in output caused by a change in the amount of labor divided by that change in the amount of labor. To do this, economists use marginal product of labor and marginal product of capital. Sometimes it's helpful to calculate the contribution to the output of the last worker or the last unit of capital rather than looking at the average output over all workers or capital.
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