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. In simple terms, a tradeoff is where one thing increases, and another must decrease. Tradeoffs stem from limitations of many origins, including simple physics – for instance, only a certain volume of objects can fit into a given space, so a full container must remove some items in order to accept any more, and vessels can carry a few large items or multiple small items. 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. An economic example is the decision to invest in stocks, which are risky but carry great potential return, versus bonds, which are generally safer but with lower potential returns.
The theoretical description of trade-offs involves the pareto front.
Examples
The concept of a trade-off is often used to describe situations in everyday life.[1]
Economics
In economics a trade-off is expressed in terms of the opportunity cost of a particular choice, which is the loss of the most preferred alternative given up.[2] A tradeoff, then, involves a sacrifice that must be made to obtain a certain product, service, or experience, rather than others that could be made or obtained using the same required resources. 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. If the basketball game occurs during her or his working hours, then the opportunity cost would be several hours of lost work, as they would need to take time off work.
Many factors affect the tradeoff environment within a particular country, including the availability of raw materials, a skilled labor force, machinery for producing a product, technology and capital, market rate to produce that product on a reasonable time scale, and so forth.
A trade-off in economics is often illustrated graphically by a Pareto frontier (named after the economist Vilfredo Pareto), which shows the greatest (or least) amount of one thing that can be attained for each of various given amounts of the other. As an example, in production theory, the trade-off between the output of one good and the output of another is illustrated graphically by the production possibilities frontier. The Pareto frontier is also used in multi-objective optimization. In finance, the capital asset pricing model includes an efficient frontier that shows the highest level of expected return that any portfolio could have given any particular level of risk, as measured by the variance of portfolio return.
Opportunity cost
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. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that the medical school only allows full-time study, then the individual considering stopping work would face a trade-off between not going to medical school and earning $50,000 at work, or going to medical school and losing $50,000 in salary and having to pay $30,000 in tuition but earning $150,000 or more per year after 7 years of study.
Trash cans
Trash cans that are used inside and then taken out to the street and emptied into a dumpster can be small or large. A large trash can does not need to be taken out to the dumpster so often, but it may become very heavy and difficult to move when full. The choice of big versus small trash can is a trade-off between the frequency of needing to take out the trash and ease of use.
In the case of food waste, a second trade-off presents itself. Large trash cans are more likely to sit for a long time in the kitchen, leading to the food decomposing and a nasty odor. A small trash can will likely need to be taken out to the dumpster more often, thus greatly reducing or eliminating the odor. Of course, a user of a large trash can could simply carry the can outside frequently, but the larger can would be more cumbersome to take out often, and the user would have to think more about when to take the can out.[citation needed]
Mittens
In cold climates, mittens in which all the fingers are in the same compartment work well to keep the hands warm, but this arrangement also confines finger movement and prevents the full range of hand function. Gloves, with their separate fingers, do not have this drawback, but they do not keep the fingers as warm as mittens do. As such, with mittens and gloves, the trade-off is warmth versus dexterity.[3] Similarly, warm coats are often bulky and impede the wearer's freedom of movement. Thin coats give the wearer more freedom of movement, but they are not as warm as a thicker coat would be.
Large cars can carry many people, and since they have larger crumple zones, they may be safer in an accident. However, they also tend to be heavy (and often not very aerodynamic) and thus usually have relatively poor fuel economy. Small cars like the Smart Car can only carry two people, and being lightweight, they are more fuel-efficient. At the same time, the smaller size and weight of small cars mean that they have smaller crumple zones, which means occupants are less protected in case of an accident. In addition, if a small car has an accident with a larger, heavier car, the occupants of the smaller car will fare more poorly. Thus car size (large versus small) involves multiple tradeoffs regarding passenger capacity, accident safety, and fuel economy.
Athletics
In athletics, sprint running demands different physical attributes from running a marathon.[4] Accordingly, the two contests have distinct events in such competitions as the Olympics, and each pursuit features distinct teams of athletes. Whether a professional runner is better suited to marathon running versus sprinting is a trade-off based on the runner's morphology and physiology (e.g., variation in muscle fiber type), as well as the runner's individual interest, preference, and other motivational factors. Sports recruiters are mindful of these tradeoffs as they decide what role a prospective athlete would best suit on a team.
Biology
In biology, several types of tradeoffs have been recognized.[5] Most simply, a tradeoff occurs when a beneficial change in one trait is linked to a detrimental change in another trait.[6] In environmental resource management, trade-offs occur among different targets. For example, these occur among biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and distributive equity in the distribution of funds of the program for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), as maximizing one of these targets implies reducing the outcomes in the other two targets.[7]
The term is also used widely in an evolutionary context, in which case the processes of natural selection and sexual selection are in reference as the ultimate decisive factors.[8] In biology, the concepts of tradeoffs and constraints are often closely related.[9]
Demography
In demography, tradeoff examples may include maturity, fecundity, parental care, parity, senescence, and mate choice. For example, the higher the fecundity (number of offspring), the lower the parental care that each offspring will receive. Parental care as a function of fecundity would show a negative sloped linear graph. A related phenomenon, known as demographic compensation, arises when the different components of species life cycles (survival, growth, fecundity, etc.) show negative correlations across the distribution ranges.[10][11] 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.
Engineering
Tradeoffs are important in engineering. For example, in electrical engineering, negative feedback is used in amplifiers to trade gain for other desirable properties, such as improved bandwidth, stability of the gain and/or bias point, noise immunity, and reduction of nonlineardistortion. Similarly, tradeoffs are used to maximize power efficiency in medical devices whilst guaranteeing the required measurement quality.[12]
Computer science
In computer science, tradeoffs are viewed as a tool of the trade. A program can often run faster if it uses more memory (a space–time tradeoff). Consider the following examples:
By compressing an image, you can reduce transmission time/costs at the expense of CPU time to perform the compression and decompression. Depending on the compression method, this may also involve the tradeoff of a loss in image quality.
By using a lookup table, you may be able to reduce CPU time at the expense of space to hold the table, e.g. to determine the parity of a byte you can either look at each bit individually (using shifts and masks), or use a 256-entry table giving the parity for each possible bit-pattern, or combine the upper and lower nibbles and use a 16-entry table.
For some situations (e.g. string manipulation), a compiler may be able to use inline code for greater speed, or call run-time routines for reduced memory; the user of the compiler should be able to indicate whether speed or space is more important.
Strategy board games often involve tradeoffs: for example, in chess you might trade a pawn for an improved position. In a worst-case scenario, a chess player might even tradeoff the loss of a valuable piece (even the Queen) to protect the King. In Go, you might trade thickness for influence.
Ethics
Ethics often involves competing for interests that must be traded off against each other, such as the interests of different people, or different principles (e.g. is it ethical to use information resulting from inhumane or illegal experiments to treat disease today?)
Medicine
In medicine, patients and physicians are often faced with difficult decisions involving tradeoffs. One example is localized prostate cancer where patients need to weigh the possibility of a prolonged life expectancy against possible stressful or unpleasant treatment side-effects (patient trade-off).
Government
Governmental tradeoffs are among the most controversial political and social difficulties of any time. All of politics can be viewed as a series of tradeoffs based upon which core values are most core to most people or politicians. Political campaigns also involve tradeoffs, as when attack ads may energize the political base but alienate undecided voters.
Work schedules
With work schedules, employees will often use a tradeoff of "9/80" where an 80-hour work period is compressed into a narrow group of 9 nearly-9 hour working days over the traditional 10 8-hour working days, allowing the employee to take every second Friday off.
Mathematical optimization or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed onto their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.
A space–time trade-off, also known as time–memory trade-off or the algorithmic space-time continuum in computer science is a case where an algorithm or program trades increased space usage with decreased time. Here, space refers to the data storage consumed in performing a given task, and time refers to the time consumed in performing a given task.
Fecundity is defined in two ways; in human demography, it is the potential for reproduction of a recorded population as opposed to a sole organism, while in population biology, it is considered similar to fertility, the natural capability to produce offspring, measured by the number of gametes (eggs), seed set, or asexual propagules.
Reproductive success is an individual's production of offspring per breeding event or lifetime. This is not limited by the number of offspring produced by one individual, but also the reproductive success of these offspring themselves.
Anisogamy is a form of sexual reproduction that involves the union or fusion of two gametes that differ in size and/or form. The smaller gamete is male, a sperm cell, whereas the larger gamete is female, typically an egg cell. Anisogamy is predominant among multicellular organisms. In both plants and animals gamete size difference is the fundamental difference between females and males.
Sequential hermaphroditism is one of the two types of hermaphroditism, the other type being simultaneous hermaphroditism. It occurs when the organism's sex changes at some point in its life. In particular, a sequential hermaphrodite produces eggs and sperm at different stages in life. Sequential hermaphroditism occurs in many fish, gastropods, and plants. Species that can undergo these changes do so as a normal event within their reproductive cycle, usually cued by either social structure or the achievement of a certain age or size. In some species of fish, sequential hermaphroditism is much more common than simultaneous hermaphroditism.
Allometry is the study of the relationship of body size to shape, anatomy, physiology and finally behaviour, first outlined by Otto Snell in 1892, by D'Arcy Thompson in 1917 in On Growth and Form and by Julian Huxley in 1932.
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes that may or may not be permanent throughout an individual's lifespan.
Life history theory (LHT) is an analytical framework designed to study the diversity of life history strategies used by different organisms throughout the world, as well as the causes and results of the variation in their life cycles. It is a theory of biological evolution that seeks to explain aspects of organisms' anatomy and behavior by reference to the way that their life histories—including their reproductive development and behaviors, post-reproductive behaviors, and lifespan —have been shaped by natural selection. A life history strategy is the "age- and stage-specific patterns" and timing of events that make up an organism's life, such as birth, weaning, maturation, death, etc. These events, notably juvenile development, age of sexual maturity, first reproduction, number of offspring and level of parental investment, senescence and death, depend on the physical and ecological environment of the organism.
Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. One proposed definition of constraint is "A property of a trait that, although possibly adaptive in the environment in which it originally evolved, acts to place limits on the production of new phenotypic variants." Constraint has played an important role in the development of such ideas as homology and body plans.
Phytomorphology is the study of the physical form and external structure of plants. This is usually considered distinct from plant anatomy, which is the study of the internal structure of plants, especially at the microscopic level. Plant morphology is useful in the visual identification of plants. Recent studies in molecular biology started to investigate the molecular processes involved in determining the conservation and diversification of plant morphologies. In these studies transcriptome conservation patterns were found to mark crucial ontogenetic transitions during the plant life cycle which may result in evolutionary constraints limiting diversification.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of individuals in a population of organisms have responded to natural selection across multiple generations during the history of the population. It is a sub-discipline of both physiology and evolutionary biology. Practitioners in the field come from a variety of backgrounds, including physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics.
Multi-objective optimization or Pareto optimization is an area of multiple-criteria decision making that is concerned with mathematical optimization problems involving more than one objective function to be optimized simultaneously. Multi-objective is a type of vector optimization that has been applied in many fields of science, including engineering, economics and logistics where optimal decisions need to be taken in the presence of trade-offs between two or more conflicting objectives. Minimizing cost while maximizing comfort while buying a car, and maximizing performance whilst minimizing fuel consumption and emission of pollutants of a vehicle are examples of multi-objective optimization problems involving two and three objectives, respectively. In practical problems, there can be more than three objectives.
Semelparity and iteroparity are two contrasting reproductive strategies available to living organisms. A species is considered semelparous if it is characterized by a single reproductive episode before death, and iteroparous if it is characterized by multiple reproductive cycles over the course of its lifetime. Iteroparity can be further divided into continuous iteroparity and seasonal iteroparity Some botanists use the parallel terms monocarpy and polycarpy.
Aquatic feeding mechanisms face a special difficulty as compared to feeding on land, because the density of water is about the same as that of the prey, so the prey tends to be pushed away when the mouth is closed. This problem was first identified by Robert McNeill Alexander. As a result, underwater predators, especially bony fish, have evolved a number of specialized feeding mechanisms, such as filter feeding, ram feeding, suction feeding, protrusion, and pivot feeding.
The Interactive Decision Maps technique of multi-objective optimization is based on approximating the Edgeworth-Pareto Hull (EPH) of the feasible objective set, that is, the feasible objective set broadened by the objective points dominated by it. Alternatively, this set is known as Free Disposal Hull. It is important that the EPH has the same Pareto front as the feasible objective set, but the bi-objective slices of the EPH look much simpler. The frontiers of bi-objective slices of the EPH contain the slices of the Pareto front. It is important that, in contrast to the Pareto front itself, the EPH is usually stable in respect to disturbances of data. The IDM technique applies fast on-line display of bi-objective slices of the EPH approximated in advance.
Epistasis is a phenomenon in genetics in which the effect of a gene mutation is dependent on the presence or absence of mutations in one or more other genes, respectively termed modifier genes. In other words, the effect of the mutation is dependent on the genetic background in which it appears. Epistatic mutations therefore have different effects on their own than when they occur together. Originally, the term epistasis specifically meant that the effect of a gene variant is masked by that of different gene.
Human reproductive ecology is a subfield in evolutionary biology that is concerned with human reproductive processes and responses to ecological variables. It is based in the natural and social sciences, and is based on theory and models deriving from human and animal biology, evolutionary theory, and ecology. It is associated with fields such as evolutionary anthropology and seeks to explain human reproductive variation and adaptations. The theoretical orientation of reproductive ecology applies the theory of natural selection to reproductive behaviors, and has also been referred to as the evolutionary ecology of human reproduction.
An evolutionary tradeoff is a situation in which evolution cannot advance one part of a biological system without distressing another part of it. In biology, and more specifically in evolutionary biology, tradeoffs refer to the process through which a trait increases in fitness at the expense of decreased fitness in another trait. A much agreed on theory on what causes evolutionary tradeoffs is that due to resources limitations the simultaneous optimization of two traits cannot be achieved. Another commonly accepted cause of evolutionary tradeoffs is that the characteristics of increasing the fitness in one trait negatively affects the fitness of another trait. This negative relationship is found in traits that are antagonistically pleiotropic or when linkage disequilibrium is present.
↑ Garland, T. Jr.; Downs, C. J.; Ives, A. R. (2022). "Trade-offs (and constraints) in organismal biology". Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. 95 (1): 82–112. doi:10.1086/717897. PMID34905443. S2CID243771433.
↑ Villellas, Jesús; Doak, Daniel F.; García, María B.; Morris, William F. (2015-11-01). "Demographic compensation among populations: what is it, how does it arise and what are its implications?". Ecology Letters. 18 (11): 1139–1152. doi:10.1111/ele.12505. hdl:10261/125358. ISSN1461-0248. PMID26355390.
↑ E. Aguilar Pelaez et al., "LED power reduction trade-offs for ambulatory pulse oximetry," 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Lyon, 2007, pp. 2296-2299. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2007.4352784, URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4352784&isnumber=4352185
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