Thursday, April 23, 2009

Dilemma of the Day: risk vs uncertainty

According to Richard A. Posner, innovation is like love marriage love:

When one has to choose between on the one hand marrying one's present girlfriend or boyfriend and on the other hand continuing to search for a "better" marriage partner, one cannot base the choice on a quantitative estimate of the probability that one choice will have better results than the other. A businessman who has to decide whether to invest in a project that will not yield revenues for several years is likewise making a decision under uncertainty because he cannot estimate the probabilities of many of the contingencies that, if they materialize, will make the project profitable or unprofitable.

From this perspective, the majority of an entrepreneur's decisions are economically "irrational". In other words, a different type of rationality has to be applied to innovation decisions.

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