It sucks, but we all have to do it. You get the opportunity to do two fun things but you can only afford one. How do you choose? In a perfect world I would see every new movie that interested me in the theatre, buy all the cool video games on multiple systems, have the full HD cable TV package and go for dinner with friends whenever I want, in between adventures around the world. Unfortunately I can only afford about 1/1000th of that. This results in a lot of time spent trying to gauge what will give me the best bang for my entertainment buck (yeah, yeah... prostitutes... giggle, giggle, haha). But seriously, this is something that we all probably do, although it is most likely unconscious and therefore likely inconsistent. I don’t like inconsistency. I like my world to be logical and rational, enabling me to justify my actions with ease. So I have decided to develop a system through which I can decide whether or not a given entertainment is worth my money.
First, you should decide what your favourite form of entertainment is; i.e. what do you have no problem spending money on. For me, this is movies. I love going out to the theatre to see a movie on the big screen. As long as I don’t get bored during a movie, I consider it a pretty good night out. So this will be my baseline for entertainment value. Over the course of 2010 I kept a list of every movie I watched, along with some stats for each, so I know that on average the movies I watch are ~1.7 hours long. Assuming a ticket price of $13, I am spending ~$7.65/hr of entertainment. Using this, I can create a graph that will allow me to judge the relative value of any planned entertainment.
Anything that falls below this line is good value and anything that falls above it needs some serious consideration before I spend my hard earned cash. The graph can also be used to determine how much time you would need to use something (e.g. a video game) before it became “worth it”. A brand new video game costs about $60 so as long as I get 9 hours of play out of it, it is probably a good use of my money. Let’s see how this graph holds up with some known quantities.
What we see here is no surprise, really: things like concerts are not really that good value, especially for more famous bands. At this point you really need to use kind of a mental fudge factor that takes in to account things like enjoyment level (Radiohead live is pretty mind-blowingly awesome) and rarity of event (I don’t go to many big concerts and Radiohead tours infrequently). So even though it does not appear to be a good value on my graph, I would fork over the cash for a Radiohead concert without hesitation. Unfortunately we don’t usually know how much we are going to enjoy something until after the fact, so that restricts our mental fudge factor.
I suppose if I wanted to get really fancy with this I could assign some sort of Predicted Enjoyment variable to each option, which could be combined with a calculation of the distance from the baseline on the above graph to create an ordination plot that would better represent the true value of the entertainment. Alas, I am not proficient enough in stats to do that, but it might look something like this:
