opportunity cost

English

Noun

opportunity cost (plural opportunity costs)

1. (economics) The cost of an opportunity forgone (and the loss of the benefits that could be received from that opportunity); the most valuable forgone alternative.

   Hypernyms: cost, expense

   Coordinate terms: accounting cost, marginal cost

   • 2004 June 7, “Jeff Pillet-Shore: Second Year Winds Down”, in BusinessWeek‎^[1], archived from the original on 8 March 2005, retrieved 30 Oct., 2008:

     Thanks to business school, I can understand how I've actually paid for this time at home with my family—the opportunity cost of my time, my forgone income, etc.

   • 2019 November 21, Samanth Subramanian, “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”, in The Guardian‎^[2], archived from the original on 6 April 2020:

     Implicit in this fixation with time is the thesis that the opportunity cost of regular shopping is too high – that the hours spent driving to the better bookstore in the next town can be spent doing something more valuable. […] But as our urban lives have grown more pressed for time, we have diced our opportunity costs finer and finer; from budgeting days or slabs of hours, we have come to rationing minutes.

Translations

cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone

• Armenian: այլընտրանքային ծախս (ayləntrankʻayin caxs)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 機會成本 / 机会成本 (zh) (jīhuì chéngběn)

• Czech: náklady obětované příležitosti m pl, náklady ušlé příležitosti m pl
• Finnish: vaihtoehtoiskustannus (fi)
• French: coût de renoncement m, coût de renonciation m, coût d'opportunité (fr) m
• German: Opportunitätskosten (de) pl
• Italian: costo opportunità
• Polish: koszt alternatywny m
• Portuguese: please add this translation if you can
• Russian: альтернативные затраты f pl (alʹternativnyje zatraty), альтернативные изде́ржки f pl (alʹternativnyje izdéržki)
• Spanish: coste de oportunidad m, costo alternativo m
• Tagalog: ipinagpalibang halaga

See also

• cash drag