
Personal bests as reference points - tzs
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/05/1706530115
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tzs
Reddit discussion, with comments from one of the researchers: [1]

The study used 133 million online chess games as data.

Comment from that researcher:

> I'm a professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and an avid
> chess fan. In my work I study large datasets of online human behaviour, and
> recently I've been studying decision-making with online chess games. I
> thought you'd be interested in seeing your online games being used for
> research :)

> In our paper, we find that players are motivated by beating their personal
> best ratings just as Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory would predict.
> Personal bests are "reference points" that people are loss averse towards:
> players put in substantial effort to beat them, and once they do, they
> disproportionately stop playing for awhile (because they don't want to fall
> back down below their best). Sound familiar?

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/7w60ss/just_publishe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/7w60ss/just_published_a_study_of_133_million_online/)

