# How to find opportunity cost if each choice has more than one important effect?

Let me start with an example where I DO understand how to find opportunity cost. Suppose I have choice to either work for firm A (\$1000 wage) or for firm B(\$2000 wage) or for firm C(\$500 wage). If I choose frim B, then I will forgo my best out of remaining alternatives, namely wage that I would get working for firm A. Now let's add another aspect:traveling time. Working for different firms will imply different time needed to spend on traveling back and forth between my home and work. Suppose I can't monetize saved time, but I prefer to have more free time nonetheless. I have three choices, between firm A(\$2000 wage, 2 hours traveling time), firm B(\$1500 wage, 1 hour traveling time) and firm C(\$1200 wage, 0.5 hour traveling time). Suppose I chose to work for firm B, what will be the opportunity cost of such decision? Two things confuse me in this case. There seems no clear way to pick the best alternative and then declare its effects (i.e. wage and traveling time) to be opportunity cost. Firm A offers better wage than firm C, but firm C offers lower traveling time than firm A.On ther other hand, our choice has two effects (wage and traveling time), is it really correct to take them both and declare as ONE opportunity cost, rather than two separate opportunity costs?

• "I can't monetize my free time" -- but you can assign a non-zero monetary value to each hour of your time, even if only roughly. A possible thought experiment to find this value: If someone paid you \$0.01 to travel around pointlessly for an hour, you probably wouldn't do it. But if someone paid you \$1000 to do the same, you probably would. So, the value of your traveling time is probably somewhere between \$0.01 and \$1000 per hour. By thinking of the (rough) value at which you'd be indifferent, you will have found the value of 1 hour of your traveling time. – user18 Apr 16 '20 at 1:09