At the far extreme of the continuum are those costs that can be identified with a unit of product only by the most arbitrary and indefensible allocations. An example is the allocation of a small fraction of general corporate-level costs, such as income taxes and bond interest, to each unit of product produced by each department, of each plant, of each division of the corporation. The number of arithmetic steps involved in such an allocation, and the very arbitrary choices of methods used and quantities estimated at each step, make the results questionable for practically any purpose related to prediction or decision making.