Nobody sets out to be governed by the loyalty card, yet it shapes an astonishing share of the ordinary day. If you want to see regret at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. The textbook treats regret as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. A better account of regret would begin with the ordinary case rather than the laboratory one.
The cost of being right
Nobody sets out to be governed by the loyalty card, yet it shapes an astonishing share of the ordinary day. Consider the loyalty card. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us. A better account of regret would begin with the ordinary case rather than the laboratory one.
