A trade-off (or tradeoff) is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing on quality, quantity, or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects.
Tradeoffs also commonly refer to different configurations of a single item, such as the tuning of strings on a guitar to enable different notes to be played, as well as an allocation of time and attention towards different tasks.
The concept of a tradeoff suggests a tactical or strategic choice made with full comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of each setup.
For example, for a person going to a basketball game, their opportunity cost is the loss of the alternative of watching a particular television program at home.
An opportunity cost example of trade-offs for an individual would be the decision by a full-time worker to take time off work with a salary of $50,000 to attend medical school with an annual tuition of $30,000 and earning $150,000 as a doctor after 7 years of study.
Large trash cans are more likely to sit for a long time in the kitchen, leading to the food decomposing and a nasty odor.
When copying music from compact discs to a computer, lossy compression formats, such as MP3, are used routinely to save hard disk space, but some information is lost resulting in lower sound quality.
Thus, car size (large versus small) involves multiple tradeoffs regarding passenger capacity, accident safety, and fuel economy.
[10] In demography, tradeoff examples may include maturity, fecundity, parental care, parity, senescence, and mate choice.
A related phenomenon, known as demographic compensation, arises when the different components of species life cycles (survival, growth, fecundity, etc.)
[11][12] For example, survival may be higher towards the northern edge of the distribution, while fecundity or growth increases towards the south, leading to a compensation that allows the species to persist along an environmental gradient.
Contrasting trends in life cycle components may arise through tradeoffs in resource allocation, but also through independent but opposite responses to environmental conditions.
Similarly, tradeoffs are used to maximize power efficiency in medical devices whilst guaranteeing the required measurement quality.
In a worst-case scenario, a chess player might even tradeoff the loss of a valuable piece (even the Queen) to protect the King.