It’s certainly related to Kahneman’s ideas; he was really one of the originators of behavioural economics, which a lot of the material we’ve bene blogging lately draws upon. What I found really interesting about this study is that it goes one step further than most analyses of cognitive bias. Rather than just showing the bias exists, it asked why it exists and whether it might actually be an optimal adaptation even in the context of modern decision-making.

The usefulness of frameworks is certainly an interesting topic. I haven’t read much on the topic but seminars I’ve attended (mostly related to forecasting) suggest that augmenting expert judgment with frameworks helps hugely.

The question I have for myself is: knowing that many decision makers, whether a politician or CEO, are prone to the fallacy of sunk costs (and other investment/decision bias) how do we improve the average quality of their decision making?

Have frameworks for analysis (e.g., ROI, cost benefit analysis, RIS) measurably improved the quality of decisions? or because heuristic bias is largely inbuilt in people we end up on average making the same mistakes. Maybe this explains why someone who is an outlier (like Warren Buffett) is able to outperform other decision makers because relative to other decision makers he is slightly less prone to bias? 

There seems to be link with the post there are too few smart people in the world  http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2012/03/06/there-are-too-few-smart-people-in-the-world/#comment-37023