... street''.1
Although it is clear that Zurcher was not capable of formally solving the dynamic programming problem (indeed, he only had a high school education and had no formal education in economics or probability theory) I argue that a combination of experience, intuition, and trial and error enabled Zurcher to discover a cost-efficient replacement strategy. Thus, for all intents and purposes we can treat Zurcher as behaving as if he had actually solved the dynamic programming problem. This ``as if'' argument is quite powerful and applies to many areas of human expertise. For example even though we need to appeal to some fairly deep principles of physics to explain the trajectories of balls in a game of billards, few people would argue that one needs to have a PhD in physics to be an expert billards player.
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... them.2
Research on subjective probabilities using the HRS data does reveal that individuals do have very well-defined and highly rational subjective probability assessments of a number of key events such as death, job loss, etc.
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John Rust
2001-04-10