Abstract

Two literatures give opposite advice about a step that cannot be taken back. The option-value literature, in Arrow and Fisher (1974) and Dixit and Pindyck (1994), holds that when a commitment cannot be undone and its benefits are uncertain, the information that arrives later gives value to waiting. Collingridge (1980) names a dilemma that cuts the other way: while a technology is young its effects cannot be known, and once they are known it is entrenched, so he argues for decisions kept corrigible, easy to monitor and correct. Lindblom (1959) defends deciding by small successive comparisons. The disagreement turns on a question neither side, as the parent study's reading notes record them, answers: where does the later information come from? This article reads Section IV of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which holds that the effects of a new object are learned only from experience of it, and that experience reports only on the objects and the time it covered. Set beside the option-value argument, Hume's section implies that for some steps the information that would justify waiting comes only from taking the step. Two synthetic decision records published by WSTiger, a studio of the RISCON family, are read against this: one on moving a trading system from simulation to limited live trading, one on adding to a losing position. Both records are modern, written for the platform, and synthetic. Neither record simply waits: one buys experience with a restricted live budget, and the other puts a plan and a calculation of total loss in front of any addition. Neither names who decides, by when, or a number that would end the first stage. The parent study's coding of reversibility has low agreement, and the article reports what that coding cannot carry.