Opportunity Cost

What Does Opportunity Cost Mean? 1. The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action. 2. The difference in return between a chosen investment and one that is necessarily passed up. Say you invest in a stock and it returns a paltry 2% over the year. In placing your money in the stock, you gave up the opportunity of another investment - say, a risk-free government bond yielding 6%. In this situation, your opportunity costs are 4% (6% - 2%).

Investopedia explains Opportunity Cost 1. The opportunity cost of going to college is the money you would have earned if you worked instead. On the one hand, you lose four years of salary while getting your degree; on the other hand, you hope to earn more during your career, thanks to your education, to offset the lost wages. Here's another example: if a gardener decides to grow carrots, his or her opportunity cost is the alternative crop that might have been grown instead (potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, etc.). In both cases, a choice between two options must be made. It would be an easy decision if you knew the end outcome; however, the risk that you could achieve greater "benefits" (be they monetary or otherwise) with another option is the opportunity cost. Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp#ixzz1c7rmPJCD

Opportunity cost
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the best alternative that is not chosen (that is foregone). It is the sacrifice related to the second best choice available to someone, or group, who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices.[1] The opportunity cost is also the cost of the forgone products after making a choice. Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice".[2] The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently.[3] Thus, opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary

or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered opportunity costs. The concept of opportunity cost was first developed in 1914 by Friedrich von Wieser in his book "Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft".[4]

Contents
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1 Opportunity costs in consumption 2 Opportunity costs in production o 2.1 Explicit costs o 2.2 Implicit costs 3 Non-monetary opportunity costs 4 Evaluation 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Opportunity costs in consumption

Opportunity cost is assessed in not only monetary or material terms, but also in terms of anything which is of value. For example, a person who desires to watch each of two television programs being broadcast simultaneously, and does not have the means to make a recording of one, can watch only one of the desired programs. Therefore, the opportunity cost of watching Dallas could be not enjoying the other program (such as Dynasty). If an individual records one program while watching the other, the opportunity cost will be the time that the individual spends watching one program versus the other. In a restaurant situation, the opportunity cost of eating steak could be trying the salmon. The opportunity cost of ordering both meals could be twofold: the extra $20 to buy the second meal, and his reputation with his peers, as he may be thought of as greedy or extravagant for ordering two meals. A family might decide to use a short period of vacation time to visit Disneyland rather than doing household improvements. The opportunity cost of having happier children could therefore be a remodeled bathroom. In environmental protection, opportunity cost is also applicable. This has been demonstrated in the legislation that required the carcinogenic aromatics (mainly reformate) to be largely eliminated from gasoline. Unfortunately, this required refineries to install equipment at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and pass the cost to the consumer. The absolute number of cancer cases attributed to exposure to gasoline, however, is low, estimated a few cases per year in the U.S. Thus, the decision to require fewer aromatics has been criticized on the grounds of opportunity cost: the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on process redesign could have been spent on other, more fruitful ways of reducing deaths caused by cancer or automobiles.[5] These actions (or strictly, the best one of them) are the opportunity cost of reduction of aromatics in gasoline.

[edit] Opportunity costs in production

Opportunity costs may be assessed in the decision-making process of production. If the workers on a farm can produce either one million pounds of wheat or two million pounds of barley, then the opportunity cost of producing one pound of wheat is the two pounds of barley forgone. Firms would make rational decisions by weighing the sacrifices involved.
[edit] Explicit costs

Explicit costs are opportunity costs that involve direct monetary payment by producers. The opportunity cost of the factors of production not already owned by a producer is the price that the producer has to pay for them. For instance, a firm spends $100 on electrical power consumed, the opportunity cost is $100. The firm has sacrificed $100, which could have been spent on other factors of production.
[edit] Implicit costs

Implicit costs are the opportunity costs that involve only factors of production that a producer already owns. They are equivalent to what the factors could earn for the firm in alternative uses, either operated within the firm or rent out to other firms. For example, a firm pays $300 a month all year for rent on a warehouse that only holds product for six months each year. The firm could rent the warehouse out for the unused six months, at any price (assuming a year-long lease requirement), and that would be the cost that could be spent on other factors of production.

[edit] Non-monetary opportunity costs

Opportunity costs are not always measured in monetary units or being able to produce one good over another. For instance, and individual could choose not to mow his or her lawn, in an attempt to create a prarie land for additional wild life. Neighbors of this individual may see this as unsightly, and want the lawn to be mowed. In this case, the opportunity cost of additional wild life is unhappy neighbors.

[edit] Evaluation
The consideration of opportunity costs is one of the key differences between the concepts of economic cost and accounting cost. Assessing opportunity costs is fundamental to assessing the true cost of any course of action. In the case where there is no explicit accounting or monetary cost (price) attached to a course of action, or the explicit accounting or monetary cost is low, then, ignoring opportunity costs may produce the illusion that its benefits cost nothing at all. The unseen opportunity costs then become the implicit hidden costs of that course of action. Accounting cost includes only costs that have been explicitly incurred, whereas, economic cost includes opportunity costs. Similarly, this is a major difference between economic profit and accounting profit; opportunity cost being a variable in the calculation of economic profit.

Note that opportunity cost is not the sum of the available alternatives when those alternatives are, in turn, mutually exclusive to each other. The opportunity cost of a city's decision to build the hospital on its vacant land is the loss of the land for a sporting center, or the inability to use the land for a parking lot, or the money which could have been made from selling the land. Use for any one of those purposes would preclude the possibility to implement any of the other. However, most opportunities are difficult to compare. Opportunity cost has been seen as the foundation of the marginal theory of value as well as the theory of time and money. In some cases, it may be possible to have more of everything by making different choices; for instance, when an economy is within its production possibility frontier. In microeconomic models this is unusual, because individuals are assumed to maximize utility, but it is a feature of Keynesian macroeconomics. In these circumstances, opportunity cost is a less useful concept.
Opportunity Cost

Scarcity of resources is one of the more basic concepts of economics. Scarcity necessitates tradeoffs, and trade-offs result in an opportunity cost. While the cost of a good or service often is thought of in monetary terms, the opportunity cost of a decision is based on what must be given up (the next best alternative) as a result of the decision. Any decision that involves a choice between two or more options has an opportunity cost. Opportunity cost contrasts to accounting cost in that accounting costs do not consider forgone opportunities. Consider the case of an MBA student who pays $30,000 per year in tuition and fees at a private university. For a two-year MBA program, the cost of tuition and fees would be $60,000. This is the monetary cost of the education. However, when making the decision to go back to school, one should consider the opportunity cost, which includes the income that the student would have earned if the alternative decision of remaining in his or her job had been made. If the student had been earning $50,000 per year and was expecting a 10% salary increase in one year, $105,000 in salary would be foregone as a result of the decision to return to school. Adding this amount to the educational expenses results in a cost of $165,000 for the degree. Opportunity cost is useful when evaluating the cost and benefit of choices. It often is expressed in non-monetary terms. For example, if one has time for only one elective course, taking a course in microeconomics might have the opportunity cost of a course in management. By expressing the cost of one option in terms of the foregone benefits of another, the marginal costs and marginal benefits of the options can be compared. As another example, if a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island is capable of catching 10 fish or harvesting 5 coconuts in one day, then the opportunity cost of producing one coconut is two fish (10 fish / 5 coconuts). Note that this simple example assumes that the production possibility frontier between fish and coconuts is linear.

Relative Price

Opportunity cost is expressed in relative price, that is, the price of one choice relative to the price of another. For example, if milk costs $4 per gallon and bread costs $2 per loaf, then the relative price of milk is 2 loaves of bread. If a consumer goes to the grocery store with only $4 and buys a gallon of milk with it, then one can say that the opportunity cost of that gallon of milk was 2 loaves of bread (assuming that bread was the next best alternative). In many cases, the relative price provides better insight into the real cost of a good than does the monetary price.
Applications of Opportunity Cost

The concept of opportunity cost has a wide range of applications including:

Consumer choice Production possibilities Cost of capital Time management Career choice Analysis of comparative advantag

Question: What are Opportunity Costs? Answer: Unlike most costs discussed in economics, an opportunity cost is not always a number. The opportunity cost of any action is simply the next best alternative to that action - or put more simply, "What you would have done if you didn't make the choice that you did". I have a number of alternatives of how to spend my Friday night: I can go to the movies, I can stay home and watch the baseball game on TV, or go out for coffee with friends. If I choose to go to the movies, my opportunity cost of that action is what I would have chose if I had not gone to the movies - either watching the baseball game or going out for coffee with friends. Note that an opportunity cost only considers the next best alternative to an action, not the entire set of alternatives. On his blog, "Conversable Economist," which, I agree with co-blogger Arnold, is excellent, Timothy Taylor gives an example of opportunity cost from Yale economist Shane Frederick: "While shopping for my first stereo, I spent an hour debating between a $1,000 Pioneer and a $700 Sony. Perhaps fearing that my indecision would cost him a sale, the salesman intervened with the comment "Well, think of it this way--would you rather have the Pioneer, or the Sony and $300 worth of CDs?" Wow. The Sony--and by a large margin. Twenty new CDs were too great a sacrifice for the slightly more attractive Pioneer. Although I could subtract $700 from $1,000 and was capable--in principle--of recognizing that $300 could be used to buy $300 worth of CDs, I hadn't considered that until the salesman pointed it out."

The problem is that the $300 in CDs given up by buying the Pioneer are not clearly the opportunity cost. Recall that the opportunity cost of something is the value of the highestvalued opportunity foregone. So the $300 in CDs are the opportunity cost only if the buyer had nothing better to do with the $300 than buy CDs. What are the odds that the salesman knew enough about the buyer's preferences to know that?