COST: Best referred to as opportunity cost, this is the highest valued alternative foregone in the pursuit of an activity. This is a hallmark of anything dealing with economics -- or life for that matter -- because any action that you take prevents you from doing something else. The value expressed in terms of satisfaction of the foregone activity is your opportunity cost. Because there are usually several alternatives that aren't pursued, opportunity cost is the highest-valued one. An opportunity cost is sometimes compensated with some form of payment, like a wage. However, the existence of an opportunity cost is independent of any actual cash outlay.

     See also | opportunity cost | economic cost | economics | value | satisfaction | explicit cost | implicit cost | accounting cost |

COST, AmosWEB GLOSS*arama, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: June 15, 2025].

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Institutional, government, technological, or economic restrictions on the entry of participants into a market or industry. The four primary barriers to entry are: (1) resource ownership, (2) patents and copyrights, (3) government restrictions, and (2) start-up cost. Barriers to entry are a key reason for market control and the inefficiency that results. In particular, monopoly, oligopoly, monopsony, and oligopsony often owe their market control to assorted barriers to entry. By way of contrast, perfect competition, monopolistic competition, and monopsonistic competition have few if any barriers to entry and thus little or no market control.

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