Why are mistakes made in decisions?
A recent study by researchers Ashton Anderson of Microsoft Research in New York, Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University in Ithaca, and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University has shed light on the issue of decision-making and its errors. Using chess as a laboratory, and a dataset of 200 million chess games played by amateurs and another dataset with nearly one million games between grandmasters, the authors started from the premise that the error in a decision is related to three factors: the skill of the player, the time available for a play/ decision and the inherent difficulty of the decision. After exhaustive analysis of the data, the researchers came to the conclusion that the most reliable prediction factor is the inherent degree of difficulty of the decision. The study invites us to discuss how errors occur in other fields. For example, is it the doctor’s experience or the difficulty of the Read More