Improve your life by making huge decisions with a coin flip, economist recommends

FACING a difficult decision? Toss a coin. It'll change your life.

This is the message from a new working paper by Steven Levitt, of the University of Chicago (the Freakonomist) that suggests people are too cautious for their own good. And he's not talking about the small-stakes decisions economists usually analyse in lab experiments—he is focussed on big life choices, like whether to quit a job or a relationship.

Working out whether people would be happier if they moved away from the status quo for big life decisions is tough. Running a randomised control trial would involve some tricky ethics and practicalities—we would rightly balk at the idea of Mr Levitt demanding that half of his sample group go get divorced to see whether they regret it. Mr Levitt got around such problems by making his experiment voluntary. He made a website (FreakonomicsExperiments.com)...Continue reading

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