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
- How To Open A Bag of Charcoal
- What is the Recommended Serving Temperature for Guinness?
- The Best At What They Do
- Pricing Bareback
- Why Does the Fastest Swimmer Anchor a Relay?
- Is It Just Your Imagination or Do All Radio Stations Play Ads at the Same Time?
- Why Do Letters of Recommendation Have A Positive Bias?
- Jeff's Intermediate Micro Course
- The TE Story
- How to Shill on eBay
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
writing
Subscribe via RSS
Jeff’s Twitter Feed
- Congratulations Northwestern Economics Graduates Class of 2020 #NU2020 #WCAS2020 @WeinbergCollege https://t.co/nY6z4hwqOO 3 months ago
- re-upping this: cheaptalk.org/2011/09/21/can… 1 year ago
- Today the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not something that the judicial system can regulate.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- “We are all just prisoners here of our own device” used to be a clever turn of phrase using a subtle form of the ve… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- Wait, then how'd they get the toothpaste in there in the first place? 2 years ago
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?