David Romer Quotes (3 Quotes)

The decisions are comparatively simple, the possibilities for learning and imitation are unusually large, the compensation for coaches who make the decisions is extremely high, and the market for their services is intensely competitive. Despite these forces, the standard assumption that agents maximize simple objective functions fails to lead to reasonably accurate descriptions of behavior.

At the end of the game, one team will have won and the other will have lost. Thus even a decision-maker who faces a large cost of losing should maximize the probability of winning.

Much of the previous evidence of systematically conservative behavior involves highly stylized laboratory settings with small stakes and inexperienced decision-makers devoting relatively little effort to their choices. Thus previous work provides little evidence about the strength of force pushing decision-makers toward conservatism. The results of this paper suggest that the forces may be shockingly strong.