This type of cost offers a potential explanation for why people stop early when solving a secretary problem in the lab.

Then the math says you should keep looking noncommittally until you’ve seen 61% of applicants, and then only leap if someone in the remaining 39% of the pool proves to be the best yet. If you’re still single after considering all the possibilities—as Kepler was—then go back to the best one that got away. The symmetry between strategy and outcome

A 63% failure rate, when following the best possible strategy, is a sobering fact. Even when we act optimally in the secretary problem, we will still fail most of the time—that is, we won’t end up with the single best applicant in the pool. This is bad news for those of us who would frame romance as a search for “the one.” But here’s the silver

In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.

The term connection has a wide variety of meanings. It can refer to a physical or logical path between two entities, it can refer to the flow over the path, it can inferentially refer to an action associated with the setting up of a path, or it can refer to an association between two or more entities, with or without regard to any path between

The math shows that when there are a lot of applicants left in the pool, you should pass up

If waiting costs $2,000 an offer, we should hold out for an even $480,000. In a slow market where waiting costs $10,000 an offer, we should take anything over $455,279. Finally, if waiting costs half or more of our expected range of offers—in this case, $50,000—then there’s no advantage whatsoever to holding out; we’ll do best by taking the very

With two applicants, you have a 50/50 chance of success no matter what you do. You can hire the first applicant (who’ll turn out to be the best half the time), or dismiss the first and by default hire the second (who is also best half the time).

even a very good applicant in the hopes of finding someone still better than that—but as your options dwindle, you should be prepared to hire anyone who’s simply better than average. It’s a familiar, if not exactly inspiring, message: in the face of slim pickings, lower your standards. It also makes clear the converse: with more fish in the sea,