Committed Resources Committed resources are acquired in advance of usage through implicit contracting and they are usually acquired in lumpy amounts. Consider an organization's employees. The implicit understanding may be that the organization will maintain employment levels even though there may be temporary downturns in the amount of an activity used, meaning that an activity may have unused capacity. Increased demand for an activity across alternatives may not mean increased cost if there is sufficient unused capacity. For example, assume a company has five manufacturing engineers who can each work 2,000 hours and earn $50,000 per year; total engineering capacity is 10,000 (5 x 2,000 hours) engineering hours. Suppose that this year the company expects to use only 9,000 engineering hours for its normal business. This means that