Now what?

Expectations are another form of price, just emotionally valued and thus hard to express in currency values. But sometimes you can estimate expectation well by looking at the next best alternative, its opportunity cost, sometimes you can find monetary values in these alternatives. But is it accurate or simple to find the cost of an expectation? Well, this bagged questions is neither just rhetoric nor is the answer as simple as yes or no. An expectation is a multifacet animal, one can look at it value it differently than the next person. A service rendered can be an expectation, but these are often handled with actual prices, unless these services are not bought in the regular sense. Lets look closer at favors. If you ask a friend for a favor, your expectation is the value of your favor asked. The expectation to receive such favor has to be greater then the cost of this favor to your friend, and by cost of course we are not speaking of monetary. So the effort undertaken has to gain for both of you more than the value of the alternative, not doing it. Text books suggest that the opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative, but who determines what that is? Is it really obvious to people what they value emotions or activities that are in no way valued in monetary sense. Talking directly, a favor only occurs if both people value their expectation of doing such favor more than not doing it. So why would one do a favor? Coersion or blackmailing, not quite legal but I am sure it happens! Think of a bank robber with a gun and the bank teller with the received request to do a favor to the bank robber filling up the bag with money at no direct monetary cost. Why does the bank teller give out the money? Obviously, s/he favors life over death and thus his expectations to have a higher chance of surviving the robbery must be more valuable to her/him than resisting. I suggest s/he values their future emotions or expectations of such emotions higher than the money lost in the robbery. Maybe, would the teller know of passing away after the robbery s/he would act differently.
This fits nicely into the theory that there is a non-monetary currency out there, called emotions or expectations that are really hard to value in numbers, because everybody would feel differently about them. Economists use often something called utils, or happiness values. New research attempts to place numbers on utils by measuring brain activity and studying the human brain reacting to certain stimulations. That way, researches hope to identify the value each person has for certain activity. It would be interesting to include such measure of the well-being of people into the state of an economy, to see how healthy or wealthy an economy really is. Maybe one could even negotiate interest on feelings in monetary form. Banks now offering emotion accounts, automatic deposit and withdrawal would be difficult, but maybe their monetary value can be stored. Then, of course, the offering of derivatives on emotions wouldn't be that far away. You could literaly sell your smile on the market. What next, maybe the soul? I would like to see a price of that!
Or maybe there is something to not knowing everything. Afterall, that is what distinguishes humans from robots. Emotions cannot (at least yet) be calculated or one could program feelings into machines, a quite scary thought!