I would suggest something even stronger: the people exhibiting the “status quo bias” in the utility example are correct. The fact that a deal has worked out tolerably well in the real world is information and indicates that the deal has no hidden gotchas that the alternative might have. Bayseianism demands considering this information.
Where this gets confusing is the comparison between the two groups of customers, each starting out with the opposite plan. However, the customers don’t have the same information—one group of customers knows that one plan is tolerable, and the other group knows that the other plan is tolerable. Given this difference in information, it is rational for each group to stick with the plan that they have. It is true, of course, that both groups of customers cannot actually be better off than the other, but all that that means is that if you make a decision that is probabilistically best for you, you can still get unlucky—each customer rationally concluded that the other plan had a higher chance of having a gotcha than a plan they know about, and that does not become irrational just because it turns out the other plan didn’t have a gotcha after all.
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I would suggest something even stronger: the people exhibiting the “status quo bias” in the utility example are correct. The fact that a deal has worked out tolerably well in the real world is information and indicates that the deal has no hidden gotchas that the alternative might have. Bayseianism demands considering this information.
Where this gets confusing is the comparison between the two groups of customers, each starting out with the opposite plan. However, the customers don’t have the same information—one group of customers knows that one plan is tolerable, and the other group knows that the other plan is tolerable. Given this difference in information, it is rational for each group to stick with the plan that they have. It is true, of course, that both groups of customers cannot actually be better off than the other, but all that that means is that if you make a decision that is probabilistically best for you, you can still get unlucky—each customer rationally concluded that the other plan had a higher chance of having a gotcha than a plan they know about, and that does not become irrational just because it turns out the other plan didn’t have a gotcha after all.