A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice

Miller, Joshua B.; Sanjurjo, Adam

doi:10.1257/jep.33.3.144

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Generally speaking, this pervasive phenomenon is an example of counter-intuitive effects caused by probabilistic conditioning. For example, "Berkson's bias" 39,40 arises when a biased observational procedure produces spurious negative correlations. In the original context, among those admitted to hospital due to illness, a negative correlation among potentially causative factors was observed because those with no illness (who tended to have no causative factors) were not admitted to the hospital and hence not observed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Gerrish¹,

Galeota-Sprung

Cordero

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Exchanging genetic material with another individual seems risky from an evolutionary standpoint, and yet living things across all scales and phyla do so quite regularly. The pervasiveness of such genetic exchange, or recombination, in nature has defied explanation since the time of Darwin. Conditions that favor recombination, however, are well-understood: recombination is advantageous when the genomes of individuals in a population contain more selectively mismatched combinations of alleles than can be explained by chance alone. Recombination remedies this imbalance by shuffling alleles across individuals. The great difficulty in explaining the ubiquity of recombination in nature lies in identifying a source of this imbalance that is comparably ubiquitous. Intuitively, it would seem that natural selection should reduce the imbalance by favoring selectively matched combinations of high-fitness alleles, thereby opposing the evolution of recombination. We show, however, that this intuition is wrong; to the contrary, we find that natural selection has an encompassing tendency to assemble selectively mismatched combinations of alleles (the products of natural selection), thereby increasing the imbalance and promoting the evolution of recombination. We further show that population dynamics that lead to the fixation of these selectively mismatched genotypes (the process of natural selection) themselves produce an average imbalance that promotes the evolution of recombination. This fact is completely independent of the distribution of allelic fitness effects and is primarily due to the additive component of those effects. Our findings provide a novel vantage point from which the enormous body of established work on the evolution of sex and recombination may be viewed anew. They further suggest that recombination evolved and is maintained more as an unavoidable byproduct of natural selection than as a catalyst.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Gerrish¹,

Galeota-Sprung

Cordero

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These studies concluded that even though players, coaches, and fans all believed strongly in a hot-hand phenomenon, there was no convincing statistical evidence to support its existence. Instead, Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky (1985) attributed beliefs in a hot hand to a psychological tendency to see patterns in random data; an explanation that has also been proposed for behavioral anomalies in various non-sports contexts, such as financial markets and gambling (Miller and Sanjurjo 2018). Contrary to these findings, recent papers by Miller andSanjurjo (2018, 2019) demonstrate that the statistical methods used in the original studies were biased, and when their data is re-analyzed after correcting for the bias, strong evidence for a hot hand emerges.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do NHL goalies get hot in the playoffs? A multilevel logistic regression analysis

Ding,

Cribben,

Ingolfsson

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The hot-hand theory posits that an athlete who has performed well in the recent past will perform better in the present. We use multilevel logistic regression to test this theory for National Hockey League playoff goaltenders, controlling for a variety of shot-related and gamerelated characteristics. Our data consists of 48,431 shots for 93 goaltenders in the 2008-2016 playoffs. Using a wide range of shot-based and time-based windows to quantify recent save performance, we consistently find that good recent save performance has a negative effect on the next-shot save probability, which contradicts the hot-hand theory.

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“…Generally speaking, this pervasive phenomenon is an example of counter-intuitive effects caused by probabilistic conditioning. For example, "Berkson's paradox" [66,67] arises when a biased observational procedure produces spurious negative correlations. In the original context, among those admitted to hospital due to illness, a negative correlation among potentially causative factors was observed because those with no illness (who tended to have no causative factors) were not admitted to the hospital and hence not observed.…”

Section: Selection X Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Gerrish

Galeota-Sprung

Cordero

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Exchanging genetic material with another individual seems risky from an evolutionary standpoint, and yet living things across all scales and phyla do so quite regularly. The pervasiveness of such genetic exchange, or recombination, in nature has defied explanation since the time of Darwin1–4. Conditions that favor recombination, however, are well-understood: recombination is advantageous when the genomes of individuals in a population contain more selectively mismatched combinations of alleles than can be explained by chance alone. Recombination remedies this imbalance by shuffling alleles across individuals. The great difficulty in explaining the ubiquity of recombination in nature lies in identifying a source of this imbalance that is comparably ubiquitous. Intuitively, it would seem that natural selection should reduce the imbalance by favoring selectively matched combinations of high-fitness alleles. We show, however, that this widely-held intuition is wrong; to the contrary, we find that natural selection has an encompassing tendency to assemble selectively mismatched combinations of alleles, thereby increasing the imbalance and promoting the evolution of recombination across demes in a structured population. We further show that, on average, selection-driven changes in allele frequencies over time within a single evolving population generate a net imbalance that promotes recombination, and additive fitness effects drive this imbalance. Our findings provide a novel theoretical point of departure from which the enormous body of established work on the evolution of sex and recombination may be viewed anew. They further suggest that recombination evolved and is maintained more as a byproduct of natural selection than as a catalyst.

show abstract

A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice

Cited by 10 publications

References 23 publications

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Do NHL goalies get hot in the playoffs? A multilevel logistic regression analysis

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

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