You've been shipwrecked! After a terrifying storm, you find yourself washed ashore on a deserted tropical island. You are alone, thirsty, hungry, and exposed to the elements. The sun is beating down, and the nights will likely be cold.
Fortunately, you managed to salvage a few items from the wreckage before your ship sank. Your survival depends on how wisely you use these limited resources.
This exercise will help you understand subjective value, an economic concept highlighted by Carl Menger. The value of goods is not inherent but depends on your specific needs and circumstances.
Drag and drop the items below to rank them from Most Valuable (at the top) to Least Valuable (at the bottom) for your survival on the desert island.
Your survival score is:
This exercise demonstrates Carl Menger's principle of subjective value. He argued that an item's worth isn't fixed or inherent in the item itself, but is determined by individual needs, preferences, and the specific situation.
A luxury watch might be expensive in a city, but a bottle of water is far more valuable to someone dying of thirst on a desert island. Your choices likely reflected this: you valued items addressing urgent survival needs much higher than items with little practical use in this context, regardless of their usual market price.
The first items you chose to satisfy your most pressing needs (like thirst or immediate safety) provided the highest "utility" or satisfaction. This relates to the concept of diminishing marginal utility: each additional unit of a good (or in this case, each subsequently ranked item addressing a less critical need) generally provides less additional benefit than the one before it.