Target costing is a well-established strategic cost management tool in theory and practice. The original target costing model implies independence of customer preferences resulting in additive utility functions for the customer-oriented optimization of cost structures. We argue that this independence of preferences is not given until a minimum variant of a product is reached that provides its inherent functionality. This is reasonable since one cannot assign customer utility to a product that does not function in its most basic way. Our modified model accounts for the dependency of customer preferences and differentiates between the costs necessary to produce a minimum variant and those related to product features beyond this minimum variant. The customer-oriented optimization of the cost structure is then conducted only for those costs that exceed the costs of the minimum variant. This modification justifies the preference independence assumption in target costing and allows for a more reasonable assignment of required adjustments in costs per product component.

目标成本核算是理论和实践中公认的战略成本管理工具。最初的目标成本模型暗示了客户偏好的独立性，从而导致了附加的效用函数，用于面向客户的成本结构优化。我们认为，只有达到提供其固有功能的产品的最小变体，才能赋予这种偏好独立性。这是合理的，因为不能将客户实用程序分配给以其最基本的方式运行的产品。我们修改后的模型考虑了客户偏好的依赖性，并区分了产生最小变化量所需的成本和超出此最小变化量所产生的与产品功能相关的成本。然后，仅针对那些超出最小派生成本的成本进行面向客户的成本结构优化。此修改证明了目标成本计算中偏好独立性假设的合理性，并允许对每个产品组件成本的所需调整进行更合理的分配。