Sublinear costs seem like something that you'd be best off delaying to fix, maybe forever, since their impact lessens the longer you wait.
Maybe this would apply when a major change will happen that would obviate the need for a fix: a planned building teardown causes a needed roof repair on the old building to have sublinear costs, or introducing a new subsystem that eliminates the old subsystem that had the outstanding repair.
Or aesthetics: a minor marring of a building facade matters when it's pristine, but if you wait longer, the more other minor marrings appear, the less that first mar individually matters to the value of the building.
If you need to make changes to the design of an injection molded part, you'd better make them all at once, because the cost of a new mold is $100k whether you make one change or seven.
Which is what economies of scale mean, just a huge range of sub linear costs all lumped together.
Except in the real world this is being optimized based on a forecast at every point in the day and every day of the year. You might not think of demand in those terms, but it’s a huge area of optimization at both large companies like Walmart all the way down to individual restaurants.
To see these opportunities you need data, but it is the most closely guarded secret of companies.
In the short term it gives them an advantage, but in the long run society as a whole could benefit tremendously from open data sharing.
Am I wrong about this?
Examples of sublinear costs:
- When you pay lower per-unit price by ordering large lots. But you can't just wait a long time and be able to afford a giant order; your first small orders may help you generate revenue that let you buy the later big orders.
- When your team is young perhaps you need 1 new laptop per new hire. A few years later, you need < 1 new laptop per new hire b/c some receive recycled laptops from departed employees. But you can't wait 3 years and then hire 100 people and 80 laptops.
- You're growing some infrastructure which serves/covers some territory. At first, all new customers are in new territory; the ratio of new infrastructure to new customers is high. Later, some portion of new customers are covered by existing infrastructure, and that portion grows over time. But even if you could afford to build everything at once, you may not know where to build most of it until you have a bunch of customers.
- I don't really know if this one is true, but a whole industry seems to believe that a burst of advertising effort all at once is more effective than a marginally greater volume of advertising spread over a longer period. But you can't do zero advertising for 5 years and then take over time square.