Consumer Choice: Why are you Reading this Blog Post? No Seriously Why?

Consumer Choice: Why are you Reading this Blog Post? No Seriously Why?

By: Liz, Paula, and Weiding

You must be thinking, “couldn’t I be doing something else with my time instead of reading this article?”.  The answer is yes, you could be doing something else with your time, and that fact has inseparable connections with microeconomics. 

First, you are facing a trade-off: surfing the internet, watching television or playing flappy bird all seem to be more enjoyable ways of spending your time, and reading this post may not be your favorite activity.  However, you, like many of us, value a good grade for this class.  In choosing to read this article, a process which should take you less than 10 minutes, you gain more knowledge on the test material, which will allow you to achieve a higher grade. While sleeping for an extra ten minutes or surfing the Internet may give you short-term gratification, it has no significance in the long run. Thus, in choosing to read this blog you grant yourself greater utility, as you will spend a little less time playing games, but will receive a higher grade on your exam, hopefully.

Second, by choosing to read this article, you have made a choice subject to a time constraint.  Suppose you decide to read this blog post the morning of the midterm.  You wake up at 8:30am and only have one and a half hours before the exam.  Since you are still in your dorm at this point, you take those first 30 minutes to get ready and walk to class.  Now, although you really want to spend more time preparing for the exam, you are constrained by a one-hour time limit. You chose to spend ten minutes reading this article, and the other 50 minutes cramming the rest of the material that will be on the exam.  You allocate your time like this because you know that at least one blog post would be on the exam and you want to be somewhat familiar with it. 

Considering your exam goes well, and it is revealed that it’s more beneficial to read the blog and not study other material for those ten minutes. Being the rational being that you are, you decide to allocate your time the same way for next exam.  Unless you leave yourself more or less time to study for the test, you know that you will continue to allocate your time in this way if the result still turns out to be good. 

Now consider a different case. Before one exam, your friend suggests a group study. You two decide to study for the exam the night before and you have two hours. This is similar to a shift in the your budges constraint (time constraint in this case), where the line shifts out.  This will cause your optimum consumption bundle to shift to a higher indifferent curve.  Thus, you now have more time to fully prepare for the exam and you will read the blog more closely instead of briefly skimming the blogs hoping you get enough information to answer the question on the test. You will spend 20 minutes reading it rather than 10, and 100 minutes studying for the exam.  

We can graph this relationship similarly to an income offer curve that illustrates the bundles of time that you will spend reading blogs and studying other testable materials at different levels of free time you have. And from the graph we know that the more time you have, the more time you will be reading the blog.