Final answer:
Operational Efficiency refers to the ability of providing goods and services with minimal waste and maximal resource use, achieving utility, minimizing costs, and often benefiting from economies of scale. Option a
Step-by-step explanation:
Operational Efficiency is the ability to provide goods and services to customers with minimum waste and maximum utilization of resources. In an efficient economy, resources are used to their fullest extent to produce the goods and services most desired by the consumers. This means that every resource is allocated in the best possible way to provide the highest levels of utility, ensuring productivity and minimizing costs.
Economic efficiency speaks to the larger scale of efficiency within the economy. It ensures that all possible gains from trade have been achieved, and the optimal number of goods and services are being produced and consumed. Productive efficiency denotes a situation where it is impossible to produce more of one good or service without decreasing the quantity produced of another, ensuring that production processes do not waste resources.
Firms often seek economies of scale which allow for the cost per unit of output to decrease as the quantity of output increases. A larger factory, for example, can produce goods at a lower average cost than a smaller factory. This concept plays a key role in the pursuit of operational efficiency by companies like Costco or Walmart that thrive on such economies. Option a