One can think of contribution as "the marginal contribution of a unit to the profit", or "contribution towards offsetting fixed costs".

Language in the proposed statute would direct judges to more scrupulously attend to the marginal contribution a patented invention provides to a product when assessing infringement damages.

Until now, the "vital role" that President Bush has promised for the United Nations has been limited, by American design, to a marginal contribution.

Mr. Sliwa's early "accomplishments" were at most a marginal contribution to the loss of faith in the Police Department.

Repeated interest rate cuts encouraged families to buy new houses and refinance their mortgages, putting cash in their pockets; yes, the tax cut also made a marginal contribution.

Scientific research is concentrated in the developed world, with only a marginal contribution from the rest of the world.

The fifth point of difference is that Western Economists try to maximize instrumental use where the value of any entity is determined by its marginal contribution to the production output.

Such a marginal contribution has been most easily expressed in the form of a derivative-leading to the diagonal formula formulated by Aumann and Shapley.

Marginalism: the Shapley value can be defined as a function which uses only the marginal contributions of player i as the arguments.

In the common case of decreasing marginal contribution of additional links to a node, the use of simple weighting might not be very illuminating.