Yesterday, I thought a lot about the concept of willingness to pay. You see, that’s something that’s top of mind when you’re lying in a puddle of water trying to beat the clock and get an automobile back together before dark so that it’s ready to drive to work the next day. I believe that was the point where I asked my wife how much she was willing to pay a mechanic to replace the ball joint in the front suspension of her car. Clearly, the answer was substantially more than several weeks before when she asked me to perform the task…on the weekend…with a limited amount of time and variable weather conditions.

In college, I took a course in urban economics — in which we reviewed a study that surveyed comparable wage rates for different types fo commuting. At the time, people expected to receive compensation of 2.5 times their actual wage rate in order to stand at a bus stop in the rain. I remember the bus stop, because it meant that a person who earned $10 an hour valued their commuting time at $25 an hour when waiting in the rain at the bus stop. I think the study was done in California, because I’d put the bus premium on commuting in a blizzard, not the rain. There’s something about horizontal sleet that really puts a damper on things.

I’ve recently inherited responsibility for Yankee’s coverage of mobile marketing, and there’s something about willingness to pay that keeps coming up with that. As I impatiently use my mobile devices, I wonder how much I’ll value my time when I start to receive marketing messages on these devices. It’s already clear that I’ll value my mobile time differently than that time I spend consuming media on other platforms such as television and the web.

This will have drastic impacts on the amount of advertising I’ll be willing to receive…and how much I’ll value those marketing messages. Chances are good that this will be inversely proportional to the amounts marketers will be willing to pay.