Opportunity costs

A new arti­cle on CNN today sheds light on a phe­nom­e­non that’s been around for a few years now: TiVo Guilt. People pro­gram their DVRs to record entire sea­sons of tele­vi­sion shows or shows they they believe they should watch, like Sunday morn­ing news pro­grams. Eventually, they wind up with a DVR full of unwatched shows and a bit of a neu­ro­sis about delet­ing them.

Brad Barens with iMe­dia Communications tells CNN this guilt is caused by what econ­o­mists call “oppor­tu­nity costs.” People are pre­sented with so many options for relax­ation that sud­denly choos­ing and man­ag­ing their recre­ation becomes more like work.

“With infi­nite media, you have infi­nite choices, and there­fore you can have infi­nite oppor­tu­nity costs,” Berens said. “Your sat­is­fac­tion index of the thing you actu­ally choose can never be equiv­a­lent to the infi­nite oppor­tu­nity costs, so we’re in this posi­tion of being behind the cog­ni­tive eight-ball all the time.”

Related posts:

1. The lost megabytes: journalism’s wasted opportunity