Posts Tagged ‘value’

Value is Contextual – Opportunity Cost

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I may sound like I’m flogging a dead horse. I have blogged about value being contextual before, and I’m going to do it again. The reason is simple – every so often when we’re working on Pressyo (yes, we’re consistently updating it behind the scenes), we keep dreaming up things that we can possibly use or do.

They’re mostly fun stuff to do – mostly armchair economics and armchair computer science. But the thing about brainstorming things to do and actual implementation is that sometimes implementations can go spurious. We’d expect something to work one way and then it doesn’t.

So, yes, we have to constantly remind ourselves that value is contextual. And because I’m such a bore, I shall bore you, my readers as well. (more…)

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The Costs of Things, Then and Now

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Over at Dr. Mark Perry’s blog, he consistently posts about the costs of things then and now. The latest is the cost of a scientific calculator (hat tip to Alex Kirtland who posted this on his facebook.). You and I have at least one scientific calculator (I have three, and one financial calculator), and it’s interesting to see the costs drop over the years. The scientific calculator went from geek tool to something every high school student must have.

Why is this of interest to me? A few reasons actually: (more…)

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Thinking of Value

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

How much is your time worth? How much are you (and your life) worth? These questions are sometimes very much avoided – afterall, its rather hard to discuss the fact that American babies are only valued at $90 (pdf, opens in new window). Many a times, economists and actuarists have been accused of being ‘inhuman’, by boiling down human life to mere numbers, and that you cannot attach a number to the value of a person.

Thankfully though, we at Pressyo do not deal with these issues (economists call these repugnant transactions, where a value is attached but it is generally considered untasteful – i.e. a ‘yuck’ factor). We do however deal with another kind of repugnant transaction that will be discussed in future blog posts. At Pressyo, we deal with valuating information, which in itself, presents a different challenge than say, evaluating how much insurers should pay for a lost thumb on a construction worker (about 10% of your health insurance, depending on which country you’re in).

There are several problems with trying to evaluate information. In attempt to be brief, I shall list a few down and not cite any academic sources (also, the dearth of popular academic articles with regards to this topic means that I’m too lazy to find the more obscure ones). (more…)

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Posted in Economics | 3 Comments »