Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Sean Byrnes's avatar

"Although it might sometimes be useful to ask people why they make particular decisions, it is not clear to me how much value or understanding one gets from that."

While I don't do economics research, I do a lot of research around buying and selling of innovative or novel products in various categories for my businesses and investments. For me, the value of collecting why someone believes they made a decision is that it provides a collection of hypotheses. The buyer believes they made a decision for reason X, what happens next time they are presented with X? Do they make the same decision or a different decision?

For innovative products, there is no history to analyze, no data to reference. The buyers' provided reason is the best proxy we have for what might be the truth, and then we can test it.

Expand full comment
NJW's avatar

This is a pretty weak post.

Expand full comment
2 more comments...

No posts