Try playing this game: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=117

In this door game, you are given the choice to click on one of three doors. You only have 50 clicks to use, so you must use your clicks wisely. All the doors start out closed, and you must click on a door to open it. Opening one door closes the others. By clicking on the open door, you will earn some number of points. Each click on an open door can give you a different number of points.

 In one round of this game, the doors remained a fixed size. In other rounds, doors will shring each time they are not clicked on, until eventually the doors disappear. This feature of the game proved to affect some of the players’ strategies, causing them to go back and forth between doors so that the doors would not disappear.

In this article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=science, Tierney discusses the disadvantages of keeping options open. In the door game, it is evident that keeping doors from disappearing had costs: it cost a click to open a new door and there was an opportunity cost from not clicking on the door that was already open. The article suggests that when options are threatened to disappear, decision makers try harder to keep these options available, even if the options seem to be of little benefit.

 Dr. Ariely, a professor at MIT in behavioral economics, has performed experiments, like the door game, that explore the incentives of keeping options open. His research has shown that people keep options open because of their aversion to loss and their overvaluation of these options. This article relates to the game theory that we have discussed in class. Though the best strategy is to stick to one door in this particular door game, other factors cause us to act irrationally. It is interesting to see how simiple notions such as disappearing option can distract a player from choosing the best response.