Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Trivial economics of time allocation as applied to blogging

Why do I blog? Blogging is a matter of self-expression, mostly, along with the hope that some reader may be entertained or informed (in that order of difficulty). This is consistent with a model in which the number of posts in my blog appears as an argument in my utility function, alongside consumption of rice, housing services, transport services....

As Becker argued, utility is actually a production process involving commodities purchased in the market, as well as time. Time however is also a factor in producing the income to purchase the market goods. So the choice of time allocation and choice of goods is a compromise between competing ways of generating utility. For example, in deciding to buy a DVD, the biggest factor is time (for the dollar-per-disk variety, cost is rather trivial.)

And similarly for posting in the weblog. It is relatively easy to trace a life history of my schedule over the past couple of years. In general during months where the frequency of posting would be higher, the value of my time for income-generation was rather low (deadlines farther away).

Now is as fairly convoluted an explanation as you can get for a posting hiatus.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi. I wanted to send you Bill Gates' Harvard 2007 Commencement Speech. A wonderful speech. You will find common ground when he talks about the transforming power of the Internet. Your blog is one of those that I read because in a way, it educates me. Hopefully, that education will enable to be an contributor to discussions about similar/related issues.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118124139854628069.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Anonymous said...

Not sure why the link doesn't show up:

http://online.wsj.com/article
/SB118124139854628069.html?mod
=googlenews_wsj

Roehlano said...

Hi Gregory,

Glad to know this blog is informative.