TY  - JOUR
AU  - Benkard,C. Lanier
TI  - Learning and Forgetting:  The Dynamics of Aircraft Production
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7127
PY  - 1999
Y2  - May 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7127
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7127.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
C. Lanier Benkard
Stanford Graduate School of Business
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650 725-2173
E-Mail: lanierb@stanford.edu
AB  - This paper introduces a new cost dataset for a commercial aircraft firm and uses this data to analyze the dynamics of learning in commercial aircraft production. This dataset is found to be inconsistent with the simple learning hypothesis, and particularly the prediction that a firm's unit cost must decline with its cumulative production. Instead, strong support is found for the hypothesis of organizational forgetting, a more general learning model where unit costs are similarly dependent on a firm's past production experience, but where that experience depreciates over time. Additionally, it is found that some, but not all, of a firm's production experience transfers from one generation of an aircraft to the next. This evidence adds to our understanding of productivity in industries with learning and thus has implications to many fields of economics.
ER  -