From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishdiminishing returnsdiminishing returnsGOOD ENOUGHwhen the profits or advantages you are getting from something stop increasing in relation to the effort you are making → diminish
Examples from the Corpus
diminishing returns• Technologies that helped rescue developing countries from famine in the 1970s have reached the point of diminishing returns.• The problem with chocolates is that they operate on a loss curve of massively diminishing returns.• One was the idea of diminishing returns, applied in this case to income or wealth.• A law of diminishing returns applies to seed but not to pollen.• It is a process of diminishing returns, as Arthur Holmes showed mathematically nearly 30 years ago.• But it doesn't take a crystal ball to figure out the diminishing returns involved in planning programmes around such disposable performers.• They have created new forms of entertainment rather than providing variations on old themes that inevitably have diminishing returns over time.• For all of us there is also the law of diminishing returns that goes to work with each successive bite.From Longman Business Dictionarydiminishing returnsdiˌminishing reˈturns noun [plural]ECONOMICS1the idea that a point can be reached where the advantage or profit you are getting stops increasing in relation to the effort you are makingBy the mid-1990s, cost-cutting and restructuring were producing diminishing returns and the emphasis swung back to growth in revenues.2the law of diminishing returns the idea that when workers use a particular amount of something such as land or machinery, each additional worker will produce less and create less profit than the previous worker 