But those incremental profits might have an insignificant impact on a much larger bank.

Any incremental profits generated from the repair business would go directly to their bottom line."

The business would choose this approach because the incremental profit of 10 cents from the transaction is better than no sale at all.

Stations will be asked to pay the network 25 percent of all incremental profits they derive from their association with the network.

Mr. Abt said restaurants typically make incremental profits of 7 or 8 percent when they contract with delivery services.

The last step, the step where someone actually takes your money--it's not just cheap, it's nothing but incremental profit.

This makes it extremely difficult for management to generate incremental profits from day-to-day operations, and they will have to rely more on net interest income."

Or promise free scuba, but charge people $70 for a checkout course before you let them dive... low marginal cost, high incremental profit.

But the key, Levitt determined, lay in the fact that agents "receive only a small share of the incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value."

This portion of incremental profit would only be attributable to the patent and would therefore be the value of the patent.

He said he would "relentlessly slash prices," even if it cut into incremental profits, because he was convinced that it was the right thing to do.

It draws customers with inexpensive groceries, and it makes incremental profits when someone throws a DVD player or a digital camera into the cart as well.

"I think there are $10 billion to $15 billion in incremental profit from interactive television," said Steven Heyer, the president of Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting unit.

Yet whether or not Geocities ever produces much in incremental profits for Yahoo, the acquisition may well pay for itself simply by bolstering Yahoo's perceived "leadership" in the market.

"They're still making an ungodly amount of money," John Keefe, an independent New York securities analyst, said, "but based on these numbers it looks like the quarter just turned in had relatively little incremental profit.

"We can evaluate it really in terms of our sales, just purely the amount of profit, from incremental profit that we've got as a result of that design - getting us increased sales, increased margin and more importantly, increased distribution.

They focus on the positive kind, which they say offers "an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services and, in the end, is the source of all innovation, new-market creation and, for business, ultimately represents the basis of all incremental profit."

The Incentive-Intensity Principle states that the optimal intensity of incentives depends on four factors: the incremental profits created by additional effort, the precision with which the desired activities are assessed, the agent's risk tolerance, and the agent's responsiveness to incentives.

"Even if they invested the money in the money market - and let's hope they could earn a higher return than that - at the very least, they would have incremental profit," said Michael Horn, the president of the National Thrift Services division of Ryan, Beck & Company, a Wall Street brokerage.