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Opportunity cost is the concept of ensuring efficient use of scarce resources, [25] a concept that is central to health economics. The massive increase in the need for intensive care has largely limited and exacerbated the department's ability to address routine health problems.
It measures what an additional unit of one good costs in units forgone of the other good, an example of a real opportunity cost. Thus, if one more Gun costs 100 units of butter, the opportunity cost of one Gun is 100 Butter. Along the PPF, scarcity implies that choosing more of one good in the aggregate entails doing with less of the other good.
The marginal opportunity costs of guns in terms of butter is simply the reciprocal of the marginal opportunity cost of butter in terms of guns. If, for example, the (absolute) slope at point BB in the diagram is equal to 2, to produce one more packet of butter, the production of 2 guns must be sacrificed.
Opportunity cost is also often defined, more specifically, as the highest-value opportunity forgone. So let's say you could have become a brain surgeon, earning $250,000 per year, instead of a ...
Economic cost is the combination of losses of any goods that have a value attached to them by any one individual. [1] [2] Economic cost is used mainly by economists as means to compare the prudence of one course of action with that of another. The comparison includes the gains and losses precluded by taking a course of action as well as those ...
Implicit cost. In economics, an implicit cost, also called an imputed cost, implied cost, or notional cost, is the opportunity cost equal to what a firm must give up in order to use a factor of production for which it already owns and thus does not pay rent. It is the opposite of an explicit cost, which is borne directly. [1]
The opportunity cost of any activity is the value of the next-best alternative thing one may have done instead. Opportunity cost depends only on the value of the next-best alternative. It does not matter whether one has five alternatives or 5,000. Opportunity costs can tell when not to do something as well as when to do something. For example ...
Even if something appears to be free, there is always a cost to the person or to society as a whole, although that may be a hidden cost or an externality. For example, as Heinlein has one of his characters point out, a bar offering a free lunch will likely charge more for its drinks. Early uses TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order.