Final answer:
Mixed costs have both fixed and variable components. A website providing medical advice initially incurs high fixed costs but relatively low variable costs once operational. If the site's traffic increases significantly, additional variable costs may arise due to necessary upgrades.
Step-by-step explanation:
An example of a cost with a mixed behavior pattern could be the expenses associated with running a website that provides medical advice. Initially, this kind of service has high fixed costs including establishing the website, aggregating information, and securing computer servers. These costs do not change regardless of the number of users accessing the site.
However, once operational, the variable costs are relatively low, such as the ongoing cost of monitoring the system and updating information. Despite this, if the website's popularity dramatically increases, it might require significant additional expenses to handle the traffic, such as upgrading server capacity, thus introducing a variable component to the costs that typically remains flat. This creates a cost structure that has both fixed and variable characteristics, making it a mixed cost.