Weber’s Model of Industrial Location and Least Cost Theory By: Harrison Dromey and Bryce Acree

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

REPRESENTATION OF THE MODEL The theory is represented by a diagram in the form of a triangle, Weber’s Location Triangle The triangle describes three main factors, transportation costs, labor costs, and agglomeration economies The location of the industry is found by considering an optimal distance between each of these factors.

SOLVING THE MODEL Solving the model requires finding the lowest transport cost location and adjusting this with labor costs and agglomeration economies Weber used this triangle to locate where the optimal location is by considering a product of w(M) tons to be sold at market M, w (S1) and w(S2) tons of material coming from S1 and S2, which are necessary. Then the rest of the problem lies in finding the optimal location, P, at the respective distance from d(M), d(S1), and d(S2). This can be found by using trigonometry, Varignon’s solution, or with GIS.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN This model theorizes that an industry’s location is based off of where the transportation costs of raw materials and the shipment of the final product is the least it can possibly be. There are two special cases however

ONE SPECIAL CASE OF THE THEORY: WEIGHT LOSING CASE The first of which occurs when the weight of the final product is less than the weight of the raw materials, a.k.a, the weight losing case.

ANOTHER SPECIAL CASE OF THE THEORY: WEIGHT GAINING CASE The second exception is when the final product is heavier than the raw materials that are to be transported, sometimes occurring because of readily available resources, i.e. water, being incorporated into the product, this exception is the weight- gaining case.

HOW IS THIS APPLIED An application of this theory would be if you had a countertop store and you sell granite countertops. You would need to have a quarry that you receive the granite for your countertops from. It would be smart to have the store location based very near to the quarry as it costs quite a lot of money to transfer something as heavy as granite. Also, after the countertop is prepared, you need to ship these to people’s homes so it would be good to locate your store in between a quarry and a large suburban area. It would also be better to have it closer to the quarry rather than the suburban area since the raw material of granite would be much more expensive to transport than the final product will.

~Fin~