time isn’t money
thumbing their nose at american economist benjamin “time is money” franklin, researchers at the university of washington and the wharton school have published a paper, Spending Time Versus Spending Money [pdf] that seems to contradict the conventional wisdom.
erica okada and stephen hoch prepared the paper back in may of 2003.
Although we agree that an understanding of the opportunity costs of time is important to making good decisions, in this research we find systematic differences in the way that people ex ante spend time versus money and ex post differences in how they evaluate decision outcomes experienced after spending time or money.
translation: people have a pretty solid idea of what money is worth, but we’re a little flexible when it comes to deciding what time is worth.
this, of course, has immediate ramifications when it comes ot the concepts i’ve dragged through this blog in a thread about attention markets and the constraints thereon. you’ll find echoes of this over at barry’s blog as well, as we both bounce around theories and comments on the subjects of falling tv ratings, collapse of the music business, and other such things.
just for the record, because i have a blog, my time is worthless.