Grossmont College Cost of Time in Decision Making Discussion

I’m working on a economics discussion question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

Please tell us about a time when you took the cost of your time into consideration when you were making a decision. This could include a decision on whether or not to do something, how much to charge for something, how much you were willing to pay for something, etc. Please take the time to come up with a good example.

Example: I paid $100 to sign my son up for surf camp. The camp is on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3- 6 and is a 30-minute drive from our house. I was happily taking him each week until his grades started to fall. I told him that I wasn’t going to take him until he got his grades back up.

His response, “You should take me because you already paid for it.”

My response, “The money I spent on camp is gone (it’s a sunk cost) whether you go or not, but the time is not. You need to spend the four hours on your schoolwork instead of surfing until you get caught up. “

In this example, my son was only thinking about the explicit cost of the camp, not his (or my) implicit cost. He failed to realize that all the time he spent surfing (and being exhausted after) had a high cost in terms of his grades.