EclectEcon

I suppose this is mostly directed toward males.

Have you ever had something fall out of your shirt pocket into a toilet as you leaned over it to flush it? I sometimes carry my cell phone in my shirt pocket, sometimes a small digital camera. I guess the risk of loss might be even more serious with a high-end PDA or blackberry. And I have come close to losing them out of my shirt pocket several times in such situations.

Finally, something related to this concern actually happened to me. I was wading in the Irish Sea with a friend, and when I bent over to wash some sand off my legs, my camera fell out of my pocket, into the drink. It died a quick and watery death.

A couple of days ago I replaced it with one of these:
It gets four and a half stars from Amazon customer reviews. It is very compact, has 6 megapixels, 4X optical zoom, and other nice features.

Here are a few of the first photos I took with it.

Ms. Eclectic:



The Glovebox Lock:



Berries and Whipped Cream:


Note: it is difficult to think of myself as a rational maximizer when I

1. anticipated the possibility of such an accident, and yet
2. didn't take precautions to avoid it.

Ex post, the costs of prevention were clearly less than the expected costs of the accident. Ex ante they probably were, too. It is difficult to think of my dropping the camera into the water as an "efficient accident".

The Hand Formula strikes again.