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Indivisibility, Decreasing Cost, and Excess Capacity: The Bridge

THE example par excellence of decreasing cost is found in the case of a bridge. At the heart of the matter is a postulated indivisibility and, consequently, fixity of costs and excess of capacity. In this paper I shall analyze the case of the bridge crossing, an interesting economic problem in its own right and also the classic example of a decreasing cost case. Jules Dupuit used the bridge in 1844 in discussing decreasing costs, but the modern formulation is generally attributed to Harold Hotelling.1 I will therefore examine in detail Hotelling's analysis of the bridge, which, despite its acceptance, contains errors that have gone essentially unnoticed.2