Item — HN Reader

> Imagine you have bought two non-refundable tickets to different trips, one much more costly. You are then told that you must cancel one of them. In this case, many people will cancel the cheaper trip regardless of which one they would prefer to go on – and even though they will have spent the same amount of money either way.

I think a better example to sunken cost bias could be found than this one as people usually pay more for trips that they prefer more in the first place.

5 comments

Yeah and not just that, they speak about weighing the available information but they don’t give any more information about the situation.

If I have paid for two trips and have to cancel one of them with no refunds, I assume that I really wanted to go on both.

So when I am choosing which one to cancel, I am also likely choosing that I will later repurchase the trip that I am cancelling now. So at that point I’d be looking at which of the two trips is cheaper to replace. And if I am not allowed by the rules of this thought experiment to do so, then I must assume that the more expensive one of those two will cost more to buy again later also.

Then also as you say, which one is more preferable in the first place and again, if I was willing to pay more for one of them in the first place then presumably that one.

Unless there was something special about the cheap one. For example, maybe it’s a trip somewhere that I cannot go in the future, only now. Or a trip with someone I want to go there with and they can only go at this time. But again, all of that kind of stuff is left unspecified in the question. So if they force us to make a choice on so little information, what are they expecting, and in what sense is the kind of question they are asking anything but a straw man kind of deal?

What even were the possible answers that respondents could give? If “I don’t know”, or “too little information to determine” are an option then I’d pick one of those, but if the only answer we can give is “cancel the cheap one”/“cancel the expensive one”, then I would say cancel the cheap one, but they can’t then just go and say “oh this is a fallacy and you fell for it”.

Shruggs.

It also ignores that if you booked a trip to a place, you likely did so because you want to go to that place. Thus, if you were forced to cancel your trip due to a conflict, it is implicitly more likely that you would book a trip there again in the future - a rain check, essentially.

If the question was "Which of these trips would you like to pay for twice?", then it's immediately obvious that the cheaper trip should be cancelled.

This is a strange one. I'd cancel the cheaper one because it'll be easier to go on that cheaper trip at a later date than the more expensive one.

Choosing the one you'd rather go on right now shows a lack of planning. It seems less rational to me.

Precisely. It is fully rational to cancel the cheaper trip. Many autistic persons would say that the entire question is stupid.

Because no rationale was given for why.

> it'll be easier to go on that cheaper trip at a later date than the more expensive one

How can you infer that just from its price though? :P

Because in the world I live in, there's a strong correlation between a previous price and a future one. While it's not always the case and all kinds of factors apply, previous price is a quite relevant signal. In the absence of any additional specific information, if I know that ticket to city A was cheaper than a ticket to city B, then it's reasonable to assume that a future ticket to city A is a bit more likely to be cheaper than a future ticket to city B.

That doesn't answer my question at all - the statement was that it's "easier", not "cheaper" to go to that city at later time. Price is just one single factor that may influence how easy it will be later compared to now.

Maybe a significant chunk of your motivation to visit city A was to see it covered in snow and do some winter sports, so if you cancel it now you'll likely have to wait a whole year to do it again?

Or maybe you booked these trips to see some bands playing life? What if the band playing in the cheaper city is less likely to play again within your reachable area in foreseeable future?

There's a huge amount of reasons why canceling the cheaper trip may not be the best option, and I believe noticing that is what the article was actually talking about.

All of your examples apply equally to both A and B (since we don't have any other information about the differences between A and B) and thus have no impact at all on the expectation about the difference between future cost or easiness or benefit/utility of the travel to A versus B, so these arguments can and should be ignored.

On the other hand, the previous price is a signal that does provide some information about the differences between travel to A and travel to B and allows to make a better-than-chance decision than treating both options as equal.

The example from the article explicitly mentions that there are some (unspecified) differences in motivation other than the price that are often overlooked by non-autistic people in such cases, so these arguments can not be ignored without misinterpreting the article's example.

The two options are the cheap and the expensive one. If we're making the determination of which one to drop based on price, and are given no information about the options besides price, presumably price is the determining factor. All else being equal, cheaper means easier.

From the article:

> In this case, many people will cancel the cheaper trip regardless of which one they would prefer to go on

"All else" is explicitly not equal, there's a difference in preference for some reason other than price. This is not a puzzle with a correct answer, this is an example of specific behavior in specific cases observed in specific people who have all needed information available to them.

That's in reference to the desirability, not the availability. When I say "all else being equal" that is in reference to the future version of the same comparison. If one option is cheaper now, it will most likely be cheaper in the future too, and if it is cheaper then that means it is less demanding in terms of resources to acquire, and if it is less demanding in resources it is "easier". You might have a special case where the less expensive option will suddenly become much more difficult than the expensive option to acquire, but there is no reason to assume in any particular instance that's true.

For a more concrete example - if you have bought a $10 and a $100 ticket, buying a second $10 ticket is, all else being equal, preferable to buying a second $100 ticket, regardless of how desirable either option is.

You can't but "I don't know, I need more information" is a boring answer for a thought exercise.

Not only that, but usually people would want to have more information than what is being presented. If the location is one I'd more like to visit, or if the location is the same but one of the modes of transportation is nicer, then I'd obviously choose the more expensive of the two. Also, if my intention is that I want to visit both locations anyway, then I would also choose the more expensive option.

So I don't know the specifics of the question at hand, or if these autistic people were even able to ask these questions, but they seem rather important, and if they in fact NOT asking them but had the opportunity to do so, then I'd question the value of some of the assumptions this article seems to make.

This sounds like a poor explanation of a more nuanced study.