  The classic knapsack and related problems have natural generalizations to
arbitrary (non-commutative) groups, collectively called knapsack-type problems
in groups. We study the effect of free and direct products on their time
complexity. We show that free products in certain sense preserve time
complexity of knapsack-type problems, while direct products may amplify it. Our
methods allow to obtain complexity results for rational subset membership
problem in amalgamated free products over finite subgroups.
