By studying 200 million chess moves, researchers shed light on what gives players an advantage—and what trips them up
Making a simple decision is akin to ordering off a restaurant menu: you evaluate the available options one by one and choose whichever alternative promises to make you happiest or deliver the greatest payoff. But when it comes to more complicated choices—say, shopping for a house, devising a business plan, or evaluating insurance policies—identifying the objective “best” option is impractical, and often impossible.
Choosing a health-insurance plan, for example, requires estimating the likelihood that you’ll need a biopsy or an appendectomy—a multilayered guessing game sure to be fraught with error. Selecting a marketing strategy can be similarly knotty, as every potential move opens the door to myriad reactions from customers and competitors, leading to millions of possible scenarios, any of which the decision-maker can only imperfectly foresee.
“There’s a different dimension to decision-making when the available alternatives are so complex that you can’t even figure out what a given option is worth to you,” says Jörg L. Spenkuch, an associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School.
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]