In the community of sports statistical analysis, the most-accepted hypothesis is that coaches are reluctant to try new strategies for rational reasons. If the new strategy succeeds, they get a bit of utility, but if the new strategy fails, they get fired—and so lose a lot more utility.
Being a maverick has a negative expectation for the coach, even though it might have a positive expectation for the team.
This hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than assuming that coaches are unaware of the result.
Yes. And since being a maverick has a similar negative expectation for most working people, it seems well-placed to explain the slow spread of good ideas more generally as well.
But there has to be some irrationality in there somewhere. That is, if you place your job at risk by not buying IBM even when it is not the best choice, it has to be either that the person who gets to decide whether or not to fire you has wrong ideas, or that the people that person needs to satisfy have wrong ideas. So in the football example, if it’s not the coaches, it has to be someone else, most likely the fans.
It seems like it would be rational to fire someone who diverged from traditional methods and then lost. Even though there’s a correlation between running and winning, that doesn’t show causation, and the coach might just be barking up the wrong tree. And then he’s “someone who bet your money on some crazy idea”, who doesn’t seem like the sort of person you’d want working for you.
Of course, on Monday morning, we can easily tell that the coach should not be fired for this particular plan.
It’s true that it can be rational to fire someone who doesn’t buy IBM if the decision not to buy IBM constitutes evidence that worker is of low quality. But I don’t think that’s the case here. I think that if a football coach got fired for going for it on fourth down more often than most, he would have been fired because of that decision itself, not because going on fourth down represents a signal that he’s just generally a bad coach.
In the community of sports statistical analysis, the most-accepted hypothesis is that coaches are reluctant to try new strategies for rational reasons. If the new strategy succeeds, they get a bit of utility, but if the new strategy fails, they get fired—and so lose a lot more utility.
Being a maverick has a negative expectation for the coach, even though it might have a positive expectation for the team.
This hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than assuming that coaches are unaware of the result.
Yes. And since being a maverick has a similar negative expectation for most working people, it seems well-placed to explain the slow spread of good ideas more generally as well.
But there has to be some irrationality in there somewhere. That is, if you place your job at risk by not buying IBM even when it is not the best choice, it has to be either that the person who gets to decide whether or not to fire you has wrong ideas, or that the people that person needs to satisfy have wrong ideas. So in the football example, if it’s not the coaches, it has to be someone else, most likely the fans.
It seems like it would be rational to fire someone who diverged from traditional methods and then lost. Even though there’s a correlation between running and winning, that doesn’t show causation, and the coach might just be barking up the wrong tree. And then he’s “someone who bet your money on some crazy idea”, who doesn’t seem like the sort of person you’d want working for you.
Of course, on Monday morning, we can easily tell that the coach should not be fired for this particular plan.
It’s true that it can be rational to fire someone who doesn’t buy IBM if the decision not to buy IBM constitutes evidence that worker is of low quality. But I don’t think that’s the case here. I think that if a football coach got fired for going for it on fourth down more often than most, he would have been fired because of that decision itself, not because going on fourth down represents a signal that he’s just generally a bad coach.