When you’re presented with two options, the one you forego is your opportunity cost. If you have more than two, your opportunity cost is the value of the next best option. Taking advantage of new ideas and concepts that sometimes come your way is one of the most significant missed opportunities many businesses face. Often, this will occur when you upgrade your business or improve your advertising methods. The concept of marginal cost in economics is the incremental cost of each new product produced for the entire product line. For example, if you build a plane, it costs a lot of money, but when you build the 100th plane, the cost will be much lower.
Suppose a security leader wishes to evaluate application-security testing tools. If the security leader considers only the focal options, comparing the relative costs and benefits of each tool, these facets of the potential decision outcomes would be neglected despite bearing a nontrivial cost to the organization. Economic profit does not indicate whether or not a business decision will make money. It signifies if it is prudent to undertake a specific decision against the opportunity of undertaking a different decision. As shown in the simplified example in the image, choosing to start a business would provide $10,000 in terms of accounting profits. However, the decision to start a business would provide −$30,000 in terms of economic profits, indicating that the decision to start a business may not be prudent as the opportunity costs outweigh the profit from starting a business.
The Cost of Missed Opportunities
When considering two different securities, it is also important to take risk into account. For example, comparing a Treasury bill to a highly volatile stock can be misleading, even if both have the same expected return so that the opportunity cost of either option is 0%. That’s because the U.S. government backs the return on the T-bill, making it virtually risk-free, and there is no such guarantee in the stock market. Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists have differentiated fast and automatic thinking (system 1) from slower, analytical thinking (system 2).7 Fast and automatic thinking—sometimes described as the «lizard brain»—is optimized for ease. The basic instincts of the human brain in the limbic cortex support survival and efficiency.
Always considering a null baseline is a worthy heuristic for encouraging security decision-makers to consider opportunity cost. This heuristic simplifies the consideration of opportunity cost and makes best use of finite time and attention. When evaluating a solution to a problem area, security professionals should consider «do nothing» as their baseline and approximate its benefits. Security programs are components of organizations and can expend energy or absorb it, but energy is neither created nor destroyed. Beseeching employees to be vigilant to phishing threats requires them to expend energy, which the security team absorbs (as these user efforts allow the security team to expend energy elsewhere). Requiring software engineers to triage bugs discovered by vulnerability scanners is another example; developers expend energy combing through findings and fixing them, and the security team absorbs that energy.
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Therefore, the opportunity cost of not standardizing security requirements and disseminating them is high, but this cost is overlooked when practitioners consider the cost-benefit analysis of other work that takes time away from pursuing this standardization. Calculating missed opportunity is easier and more straightforward and, what is more important, much less misleading, than calculating ROI. Just think about how many times the actual ROI from the software project was several orders of magnitude less than the projected? Using missed opportunity calculation also helps you prioritize the projects. Opportunity cost plays a crucial role in evaluating the potential returns of different investment options.
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How to calculate opportunity cost – with examples
Opportunity cost facilitates rational decision-making by encouraging individuals to assess the trade-offs involved in various choices. The reference to SEC registration does not imply that the SEC has endorsed or approved the qualifications of GIA or its respective representatives to provide any investment services described on this site or that GIA has attained a level of skill or training. You can use the same concept to weigh different options and figure out which one offers more benefits.
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- Additionally, due to opportunity costs, businesses can create more solidified and logical decisions as they consider all potential options before coming down to one.
- If it were positive, then the company would be losing more than gaining by making that decision.
- Everyday examples of opportunity costs might include choosing to commute using public transit for 80 minutes instead of driving for 40 minutes.
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- That is, the organization’s priorities will become more salient, resulting in a problem statement more aligned with them such as, «Vulnerabilities exploited in production must not impact business operations.» This changes the focal area substantially.
To incorporate opportunity cost in practice, decision-makers should expend only enough time and brainpower to stimulate consideration of options beyond the focal point. The null baseline can serve as a new decision-making heuristic—a mental shortcut that can lead to better decision outcomes—that can become more automatic with repetition. The security engineering team can consider the opportunity cost of this subsequent work, too; perhaps the marginal benefit provided by requested features is less than other tasks the team could perform. The team can thereby reallocate its time to other tasks once the MVP is released rather than confining it in perpetuity.
Assuming an average annual return of 2.5%, their portfolio at the end of that time would be worth nearly $500,000. Although this result might seem impressive, it is less so when you consider the investor’s opportunity cost. If, for example, they had instead invested half of their money in the stock market and received an average blended return of 5% a year, their portfolio would have been worth more than $1 million.