Opportunity Cost: Definition, Formula, and Examples

If you use some of them now with your spare $1,000 you won’t have them next year (assuming your employer lets you roll them over from year to year). Pete Rathburn is a copy editor and fact-checker with expertise in economics and personal finance and over twenty years of experience in the classroom. Consider the following examples of opportunity cost you might use in your own life. Figure out what you stand to gain from each option and what you stand to give up if you choose it. Our writers and editors used an in-house natural language generation platform to assist with portions of this article, allowing them to focus on adding information that is uniquely helpful.

1. The opportunity cost of the 10 percent return is forgoing the 8 percent return.
2. That’s not to say that your past decisions have no effect on your future decisions, of course.
3. Your alternative is to keep using your current vehicle for the next two years, and invest money with a 3 % rate of return.

What is the Opportunity Cost of a Decision?

Figure out which choice provides the most benefits and the least cost. From your list of pros and cons, decide the benefits and costs — both tangible and intangible — that matter most to you in the short and long term. Spending time watching a movie over working on a side project involves the opportunity cost of the income or experience that could have been gained from the project. In this example, the firm will be indifferent to selling its product in either raw or processed form.

Common Misconceptions About Opportunity Cost

Alternatively, the firm can still sell the land for $40 billion. In financial analysis, the opportunity cost is factored into the present when calculating the Net Present Value formula. To go deeper into opportunity cost calculation, use the advanced mode, and follow the formulas below. As with many opportunity cost decisions, there is no right or wrong answer here, but it can be a helpful exercise to think it through and decide what you most want. If the business goes with the securities option, its investment would theoretically gain $2,000 in the first year, $2,200 in the second, and $2,420 in the third.

What is opportunity cost?

Opportunity cost is one of the key concepts in the study of economics and is prevalent throughout various decision-making processes. The opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative foregone. In simplified terms, it is the cost of what else one could have chosen to do.

Conclusion: Mastering the Art of Calculating Opportunity Cost

When considering two different securities, it is also important to take risk into account. For example, comparing a Treasury bill to a highly volatile stock can be misleading, even if both have the same expected top ideas for recruiting great job candidates return so that the opportunity cost of either option is 0%. That’s because the U.S. government backs the return on the T-bill, making it virtually risk-free, and there is no such guarantee in the stock market.

We will keep the price of bus tickets at 50 cents.Figure 3 (Interactive Graph). If we plot each point on a graph, we can see a line that shows us the number of burgers Charlie can buy depending on how many bus tickets he wants to purchase in a given week. If you plug other numbers of bus tickets into the equation, you get the results shown in Table 1, below, https://www.bookkeeping-reviews.com/reduce-scrap-and-rework-costs/ which are the points on Charlie’s budget constraint. A business choosing between two projects must consider the potential profits from each, determining the opportunity cost as the profit foregone by not choosing the alternative. If an investor chooses investment A, which returns 5%, over investment B, which returns 7%, the opportunity cost is 2% (7% – 5%).

Your life is the result of your past decisions, and that, essentially, is the definition of opportunity cost. For example, imagine your aunt had to decide between buying stock in Company ABC and Company XYZ. In this case, she can clearly measure her opportunity cost as 5% (8% – 3%).

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