Recurring suboptimal choices result in superior decision making.

Abstract

In real-life situations involving risk and uncertainty, optimal policy hinges on selecting a course of action characterized by the highest expected value (i.e., future outcomes weighted by their probabilities). Nevertheless, a vast body of �ndings from economic and psychological studies indicate that people rarely follow this principle and make suboptimal choices. In the current research, we tested a hypothesis that recurring suboptimal choices result in superior decision making. In one simulation study and three well-powered (N = 1,046) fully-incentivized empirical studies, we demonstrated that people who traded off their decision accuracy for the number of possible choices performed better (i.e., they earned more money) than those who made optimal decisions in terms of maximizing the expected value. Our results demonstrate that decision makers can adapt to the requirements of a decision task. They are inclined to make more suboptimal decisions, resulting in better overall performance than normatively better choices.