This is

is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiato.

Facebook is currently worth some 400 billion dollars

to its shareholders, which might seem like a lot.

But a recent study suggests the company's worth

many times more than that to its users.

Basically, our punchline is that Facebook does seem

to bring value to its users.

And maybe that's the nicest thing anybody said about Mark Zuckerberg all year,

you know but it does seem to bring joy or utility to people.

Sean B. Cash is an economist at Tufts University in Boston.

He and his team asked some 1,300 Facebook users from colleges, community, and online

samples to put a dollar figure on the value the social network brings to their lives.

Specifically, they asked users how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate their accounts.

And the stakes were real.

If a user's offer was accepted, she'd have to deactivate our account for up to a year.

And Cash, remember, that's the actual name of the

economist, cash, would have to pony up the money. We did have some budget-breaking

surprises. But just how big of a surprise? Cash and his team found that on

average users asked for more than a

thousand dollars in exchange for shutting down their accounts for a year. They

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