Source Levitt, S.D., 2021. Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness Rev. Econ. Stud. 88, 378 -405. A computerized coin-toss fortune-telling session and receive a fortune-telling result with a 50% chance each of “keep the status quo” or “change”. In the experiment, further questions are asked two and six months later about what decisions they made, their level of happiness, and whether they think they made the right decision… The analysis showed that those who chose change according to a coin toss were happier than those who chose to maintain the status quo and often thought it was a better choice. https://smbiz.asahi.com/article/14620431
- I’ve been arguing for a while that when in doubt is an equal estimate of the alternatives, so you can coin flipping and decide, but I’m going to take it a step further from there.
- Unlike the case where you are lost between action A and action B, it is not valid if you are lost between action A and non-action notA (maintenance of the status quo).
- Because humans have status quo bias, when we are torn between A and notA, notA is overestimated by bias and is rated equal, so A is more promising by the amount of bias.
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