Comes from being able to infer that since by now you have not found any clear reason to favor one choice over the other it means that you are close to indifferent and you should pick now, even randomly.
Top Posts
- Is It Just Your Imagination or Do All Radio Stations Play Ads at the Same Time?
- Coke For A Nickel
- Three Game Theorists Walk Into A (Common Value) Bar
- Why Is It A Crime To Park Facing The Wrong Way?
- Pricing Bareback
- Obsessively Checking Email, Feel Free To Profit From This Idea
- More Guns, Less Crime, More Violence Conditional on Crime
- Left, Right, Then Left Again
- Organs for Money
- Ariel Rubinstein's Didactic Game Theory Site
Tags
art art of office politics banana seeds blog books boston california chicago coffee computers crime current events decision-making economics education evolution family financial crisis food and wine friends funny game theory incentives iPhone kludge language law marriage maths movies music obama politics psychology publishing sandeep has bad taste sanitation sport statistics suicide teaching terrorism the web tomatoes travel TV vapor mill war winter writingSubscribe via RSS
Jeff’s Twitter Feed
- RT @ethan_iverson: I think I will be stealing this idea outright from Sam when teaching 5 days ago
- THE COLOR OF MONEY = Friends twitter.com/ethan_iverson/… 1 week ago
- RT @Mylovanov: KSE graduates die defending Ukraine. Now Denys Antipov. It is easy to get used to this news. But this is not normal and shou… 1 week ago
- RT @Mylovanov: This me in Kyiv at the Kyiv School of Economics. After giving a talk yesterday to prospective students. We teach, we do rese… 1 week ago
- Chekhov blows. 1 week ago
Cheap Talk 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 17, 2013 at 11:52 pm
Lones Smith
1. You are ignoring the possibility of being forced to decide ASAP. Fine.
2. Even still, this logic ignores the option value of changing your mind. Optionality comes from uncertainty about what you *will* learn. That you have so far not “found any clear reason to favor one choice over the other” is a *backward looking* notion. But optionality is *forward-looking* — it speaks to the arrival rate of future ideas and/or the thickness of the density of the tail ideas. The second notion is addressed by the paper “Conversational War of Attrition” that Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn (UCLA) and I are now writing up.
Bottom line: I think some indecision is called for your theory of decisiveness.
February 18, 2013 at 10:21 am
Enrique
Perhaps we can restate the claim this way: there is an optimal rate of indecision, but when the cost of not deciding outweighs the cost of any possible decision, then decide randomly
February 18, 2013 at 10:34 am
Joshua Gans
How long did it take you to decide to write that post?