Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice—which I haven't read, though I've read some of the research behind it—talks about how offering people more choices can make them less happy.

A simple intuition says this shouldn't ought to happen to rational agents: If your current choice is X, and you're offered an alternative Y that's worse than X, and you know it, you can always just go on doing X. So a rational agent shouldn't do worse by having more options. The more available actions you have, the more powerful you become—that's how it should ought to work.

For example, if an ideal rational agent is initially forced to take only box B in Newcomb's Problem, and is then offered the additional choice of taking both boxes A and B, the rational agent shouldn't regret having more options. Such regret indicates that you're "fighting your own ritual of cognition" which helplessly selects the worse choice once it's offered you.

But this intuition only governs extremely idealized rationalists, or rationalists in extremely idealized situations. Bounded rationalists can easily do worse with strictly more options, because they burn computing operations to evaluate them. You could write an invincible chess program in one line of Python if its only legal move were the winning one.

Of course Schwartz and co. are not talking about anything so pure and innocent as the computing cost of having more choices.

If you're dealing, not with an ideal rationalist, not with a bounded rationalist, but with a human being—

Say, would you like to finish reading this post, or watch this surprising video instead?

Schwartz, I believe, talks primarily about the decrease in happiness and satisfaction that results from having more mutually exclusive options. Before this research was done, it was already known that people are more sensitive to losses than to gains, generally by a factor of between 2 and 2.5 (in various different experimental scenarios). That is, the pain of losing something is between 2 and 2.5 times as worse as the joy of gaining it. (This is an interesting constant in its own right, and may have something to do with compensating for our systematic overconfidence.)

So—if you can only choose one dessert, you're likely to be happier choosing from a menu of two than a menu of fourteen. In the first case, you eat one dessert and pass up ...

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