Technical Note: Properties of the Cubic Production Function

Abstract

In the interest of improving the understanding of both students and practitioners of technical economics of some fundamental aspects of the subject, this note provides a clarification of the isoquant properties of the two-input cubic production function. Two alternatives to the “usual” cubic production function are proposed herein: the “additive” and the “multiplicative.” In contrast to the usual function, both of these alternatives possess the intuitively expected isoquant properties: the three-dimensional surface of the function is a “hill” or “protuberance” with a unique peak, and the corresponding family of isoquants is a set of closed oblongs reminiscent of a contour map.