Facebook is currently worth some $400 billion dollars to its shareholders¹. Which might seem like a lot. But a recent study suggests the company is worthmany times more than that, to its users.

对于Facebook的股东来说，Facebook的目前价值约为4000亿美元。这一价值可能看起来很高。但最近的一项研究表明，Facebook在其用户心中的价值可能要数倍高于这一数值。

"Basically our punch line is that Facebook seems to bring value to its users, and maybe that's the nicest thing anybody has said about Mark Zuckerberg all year. But it does seem to bring joy or utility to people." Sean B. Cash is an economist² at Tufts University in Boston.

波士顿塔夫茨大学的经济学家西恩·B·卡什称：“我们研究的关键点在于，Facebook似乎为其用户带来了更多的价值，也许这是今年以来马克·扎克伯格最喜闻乐见的事情了。但Facebook似乎给人们带来了更多欢乐或实用。”

He and his team asked some 1,300 Facebook users, from colleges, community, and online samples, to put a dollar number on the value the social network brings to their lives.

他和他的团队向来自大学、社区和在线随机抽取的约1300名Facebook用户询问Facebook为他们的生活带来的真实价值。

Specifically, they asked users how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate³ their accounts. And the stakes were real. If a user's offer was accepted, she'd have to deactivate her account, for up to a year.

具体来说，他们询问了用户需要被支付多少钱才肯停用他们的帐户。并且这一奖金是真实的。如果该用户的开价被实验团队所接受，她必须停用她的帐户，最长时间可达到一年。

And Cash -- remember, that's the actual name of the economist, Cash -- would have to pony⁴ up the money. "We did have some budget breaking surprises."

卡什--请记住，这是这位经济学家的真实姓名（与现金谐音）--将不得不掏钱。“我们确实有一些突破预算的惊喜。”

But how big of a surprise? Cash and his team found that, on average, users asked for more than $1,000 dollars in exchange for shutting down their accounts for a year. They reported the results in the journal PLOS ONE.

但是这项惊喜发现究竟有多大呢？卡什和他的团队发现，平均而言，用户要求开出超过1000美元的出价，他们才答应关闭账户一年。研究人员在《公共科学图书馆期刊》上刊登了这项研究结果。

If you divide Facebook's market capitalization by its number of users -- more than 2.2 billion -- you'd find that each user is worth about $175 bucks⁵ to investors⁶. But actual users seem to prize access to the platform at more than five times that.

如果将Facebook的市值除以用户数量（超过22亿），你会发现每个用户对投资者而言的价值约为175美元。但实际上，用户似乎更重视Facebook，愿意花上超过5倍的价钱去获取使用权限。

Not that Cash and his team are suggesting CEO Mark Zuckerberg should charge that much for access. What they're measuring instead, is what's called consumer surplus -- or more simply put, the additional perceived value -- that users get from using the service.

这项研究并不是说卡什和他的团队建议CEO马克·扎克伯格应该向用户收取更多的使用费用。他们正在衡量的是所谓的消费者剩余--或者更简单地说，是用户从使用服务中获得的自己感觉到的额外价值。

"If you think about the history of innovation in general, it's often the case, even when we see somebody like Edison making a lot of money off of the lightbulb, the value to all the users of the lightbulb since then has been much higher than whatever fortune he made."

“如果你纵览发明创造的历史，就会发现，通常是这样，即使我们看到发明家从自己的发明里赚了很多钱，类似爱迪生从灯泡中赚了很多钱，但自他发明灯泡后，灯泡对所有用户的价值都远高于爱迪生当时创造的价值。”

Facebook's never-ending string of privacy missteps, though, might affect whether we'll say the same of the social network in the future. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not.

然而，无论马克·扎克伯格喜不喜欢听，我们都必须指出，如果Facebook继续永无止境地滥用用户隐私，可能会让我们在未来改变对社交网络应用做出的上述判断。