SforSingularity comments on Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer. - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 15 July 2010 01:24PM

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Comment author: SforSingularity 15 July 2010 09:13:43PM 0 points [-]

However, if you approach them with a serious deal where some bias identified in the lab would lead them to accept unfavorable terms with real consequences, they won't trust their unreliable judgments, and instead they'll ask for third-party advice and see what the normal and usual way to handle such a situation is. If no such guidance is available, they'll fall back on the status quo heuristic. People hate to admit their intellectual limitations explicitly, but they're good at recognizing them instinctively before they get themselves into trouble by relying on their faulty reasoning too much. This is why for all the systematic biases discussed here, it's extremely hard to actually exploit these biases in practice to make money.

Yeah... that sounds right. Also, suppose that you have an irrational stock price. One or two contrarians can't make much more than double their stake money out of it, because if they go leveraged, the market might get more irrational before it gets less irrational, and wipe their position.

Comment author: CronoDAS 16 July 2010 04:08:28AM *  4 points [-]

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." - John Maynard Keynes