Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - Brian Christian

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huge cost because they wanted us to move out a month before we were ready. There was another competitive offer … [but] we just kind of held out until we got the right one.” For many sellers, turning down a good offer or two can be a nerve-racking proposition, especially if the ones that immediately follow are no better. But McLay held her ground and stayed cool. “That would have been really, really hard,” she admits, “if I didn’t know the math was on my side.”

      This principle applies to any situation where you get a series of offers and pay a cost to seek or wait for the next. As a consequence, it’s relevant to cases that go far beyond selling a house. For example, economists have used this algorithm to model how people look for jobs, where it handily explains the otherwise seemingly paradoxical fact of unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies existing at the same time.

      In fact, these variations on the optimal stopping problem have another, even more surprising property. As we saw, the ability to “recall” a past opportunity was vital in Kepler’s quest for love. But in house selling and job hunting, even if it’s possible to reconsider an earlier offer, and even if that offer is guaranteed to still be on the table, you should nonetheless never do so. If it wasn’t above your threshold then, it won’t be above your threshold now. What you’ve paid to keep searching is a sunk cost. Don’t compromise, don’t second-guess. And don’t look back.

      When to Park

      I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

      —CLARK KERR, PRESIDENT OF UC BERKELEY, 1958–1967

      Another domain where optimal stopping problems abound—and where looking back is also generally ill-advised—is the car. Motorists feature in some of the earliest literature on the secretary problem, and the framework of constant forward motion makes almost every car-trip decision into a stopping problem: the search for a restaurant; the search for a bathroom; and, most acutely for urban drivers, the search for a parking space. Who better to talk to about the ins and outs of parking than the man described by the Los Angeles Times as “the parking rock star,” UCLA Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup? We drove down from Northern California to visit him, reassuring Shoup that we’d be leaving plenty of time for unexpected traffic. “As for planning on ‘unexpected traffic,’ I think you should plan on expected traffic,” he replied. Shoup is perhaps best known for his book The High Cost of Free Parking, and he has done much to advance the discussion and understanding of what really happens when someone drives to their destination.

      Shoup argues that many of the headaches of parking are consequences of cities adopting policies that result in extremely high occupancy rates. If the cost of parking in a particular location is too low (or—horrors!—nothing at all), then there is a high incentive to park there, rather than to park a little farther away and walk. So everybody tries to park there, but most of them find the spaces are already full, and people end up wasting time and burning fossil fuel as they cruise for a spot.

      Shoup’s solution involves installing digital parking meters that are capable of adaptive prices that rise with demand. (This has now been implemented in downtown San Francisco.) The prices are set with a target occupancy rate in mind, and Shoup argues that this rate should be somewhere around 85%—a radical drop from the nearly 100%-packed curbs of most major cities. As he notes, when occupancy goes from 90% to 95%, it accommodates only 5% more cars but doubles the length of everyone’s search.

      The key impact that occupancy rate has on parking strategy becomes clear once we recognize that parking is an optimal stopping problem. As you drive along the street, every time you see the occasional empty spot you have to make a decision: should you take this spot, or go a little closer to your destination and try your luck?

      Assume you’re on an infinitely long road, with parking spots evenly spaced, and your goal is to minimize the distance you end up walking to your destination. Then the solution is the Look-Then-Leap Rule. The optimally stopping driver should pass up all vacant spots occurring more than a certain distance from the destination and then take the first space that appears thereafter. And the distance at which to switch from looking to leaping depends on the proportion of spots that are likely to be filled—the occupancy rate. The table on the next page gives the distances for some representative proportions.

      How to optimally find parking.

      If this infinite street has a big-city occupancy rate of 99%, with just 1% of spots vacant, then you should take the first spot you see starting at almost 70 spots—more than a quarter mile—from your destination. But if Shoup has his way and occupancy rates drop to just 85%, you don’t need to start seriously looking until you’re half a block away.

      Most of us don’t drive on perfectly straight, infinitely long roads. So as with other optimal stopping problems, researchers have considered a variety of tweaks to this basic scenario. For instance, they have studied the optimal parking strategy for cases where the driver can make U-turns, where fewer parking spaces are available the closer one gets to the destination, and where the driver is in competition against rival drivers also heading to the same destination. But whatever the exact parameters of the problem, more vacant spots are always going to make life easier. It’s something of a policy reminder to municipal governments: parking is not as simple as having a resource (spots) and maximizing its utilization (occupancy). Parking is also a process—an optimal stopping problem—and it’s one that consumes attention, time, and fuel, and generates both pollution and congestion. The right policy addresses the whole problem. And, counterintuitively, empty spots on highly desirable blocks can be the sign that things are working correctly.

      We asked Shoup if his research allows him to optimize his own commute, through the Los Angeles traffic to his office at UCLA. Does arguably the world’s top expert on parking have some kind of secret weapon?

      He does: “I ride my bike.”

      When to Quit

      In 1997, Forbes magazine identified Boris Berezovsky as the richest man in Russia, with a fortune of roughly $3 billion. Just ten years earlier he had been living on a mathematician’s salary from the USSR Academy of Sciences. He made his billions by drawing on industrial relationships he’d formed through his research to found a company that facilitated interaction between foreign carmakers and the Soviet car manufacturer AvtoVAZ. Berezovky’s company then became a large-scale dealer for the cars that AvtoVAZ produced, using a payment installment scheme to take advantage of hyperinflation in the ruble. Using the funds from this partnership he bought partial ownership of AvtoVAZ itself, then the ORT Television network, and finally the Sibneft oil company. Becoming one of a new class of oligarchs, he participated in politics, supporting Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 and the choice of Vladimir Putin as his successor in 1999.

      But that’s when Berezovsky’s luck turned. Shortly after Putin’s election, Berezovsky publicly objected to proposed constitutional reforms that would expand the power of the president. His continued public criticism of Putin led to the deterioration of their relationship. In October 2000, when Putin was asked about

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