{"pk":26958,"title":"Make-or-break: chasing risky goals or settling for safe rewards?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans regularly invest time towards activities characterized by dramatic success or failure outcomes, where criti-cally, the outcome is uncertain ex-ante. How should people allocate time between such make-or-break activities and other safealternatives, where rewards are more predictable (e.g., linear) functions of time? We present a formal framework for studyingtime allocation between these two types of activities, and explore (optimal) behavior in both one-shot and dynamic versions ofthe problem. In the one-shot version, we illustrate the striking discontinuous relation between peoples skill and optimal timeallocation to the make-or-break task. In the dynamic version, we formulate both fully rational and boundedly rational strategies,both defined by a giving up threshold, which adaptively dictates when one should cease pursuit of the make- or-break goal.Comparing strategies across environments, we investigate the cost of sidestepping the computational burden of full rationality.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3h35745j","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Pantelis","middle_name":"Pipergias","last_name":"Analytis","name_suffix":"","institution":"Cornell University","department":""},{"first_name":"Charley","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexandros","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gelastopoulos","name_suffix":"","institution":"Boston University","department":""},{"first_name":"Angelo","middle_name":"","last_name":"Pirrone","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Sheffield","department":""},{"first_name":"Tom","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stafford","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Sheffield","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26958/galley/16594/download/"}]}