What is Opportunity Cost?
1.
(n.) the benefits and problems of not choosing an option.
You have a choice between buying a car for £30,000 or a motorbike for £18,000.
If you buy the car, the opportunity cost is £12,000 and a motorbike.
If you buy the motorbike and have some money, the opportunity cost is one car.
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2.
The cost of choosing one course of action over another. Letting your second best option pass.
Economists tend to measure opportunity cost in terms of money for simplicity's sake. However value isn't always monetary.
At the restaurant, you are presented with a desert menu. Assuming that you only eat one desert, you have the choice between chocolate mouse, ice cream and honey crepes. Let's say you prefer ice cream to chocolate mouse, but honey crepes are your favorite. If you eat a honey crepe, ice cream (which would have chosen had you not had crepes) is your opportunity cost.
Another example would be if two women that you fancied, Sarah and Alice, asked you out and you said yes to Sarah (assuming monogamy), going out with Alice is your opportunity cost.
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3.
Another way for an economist to say you aren't thinking enough about screwing everybody else over to make more cash.
Sasuke had a net economic loss, considering his opportunity cost of not god-modding himself by the method of ripping out his brother's eyeballs, drilling a hole in his skull so that he could rip out Kakashi's eye too, and challenging the entire Akatsuki organization to a royal rumble melee so that he could proceed to absorb all the tailed beasts and rule the planet. Possibly absorbing the planet too. All before he enrolls at the Ninja Academy.
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