After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free. I had a hunch that coming to understand the subject without reading the best overview available would take at least a dozen extra hours. The Kindle price for Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis was only $55. Easy choice: I bought it.

I'd love to hear more about this particular aspect of the process. That "hunch" bit seems really tricky to me, because I'm never entirely clear what's going to be useful or not. My impression is that marginal differences in information value are usually small with occasional jackpots, and a person generally can't tell if something is a jackpot without the kind of access that they'll have had to pay for. Sometimes its to the point where I can read an entire work and only notice that it was good or bad six months later, based on usage and update patterns in the aftermath of having read it.

This makes me very curious how you estimated the dozen "saved hours" to compare against the $55. Also, I'm curious how you estimated the value of the understanding to determine that it would be worth more than a dozen hours in the first place, if that was the best you could do, especially relative to all the other things you could be working on that functioned as opportunity costs?