Maybe as a Valid Decision: The Case for Not Deciding

The Assumption That Decisions Must Be Made

There is a cultural bias toward decisiveness — the belief that making a choice, any choice, is better than remaining undecided. This bias is institutionalised in management culture ("bias for action"), sports culture ("winners decide"), and everyday advice ("just pick one and commit"). The indecisive person is portrayed as weak, confused, or paralysed.

Decision theory offers a more nuanced picture. Not deciding is itself a choice — the choice to preserve optionality, to wait for more information, or to allow time to clarify which option is preferable. Under specific conditions, not deciding is the rational choice, not a failure to decide.

When Not Deciding Is Rational

Deferring a decision is rational when:

• The decision is reversible and delay is cheap. If you can decide later at low cost, and more information will be available later, waiting dominates deciding now on incomplete information.
• The decision is contingent on future events. Some decisions should not be made until a prior decision resolves — it is rational to wait for the upstream condition to clarify.
• Options will change with time. A job offer that is just adequate today may become better (improved salary) or become unnecessary (another offer arrives). Waiting to see how the option set evolves can be optimal.
• You have an option to gather decisive information at low cost. If a brief additional investigation would likely make one option clearly dominant, the value of that information exceeds the cost of delay.
• The decision carries high irreversibility and high stakes. Irreversible high-stakes decisions deserve more deliberation time than reversible low-stakes ones. "Sleep on it" is not avoidance — it is appropriate time allocation.

Option Value: The Economics of Waiting

In financial economics, the concept of "option value" formalises the intuition that keeping options open has value. A stock option gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a fixed price. This right is valuable precisely because it allows you to wait and see whether buying is a good idea, then act if it is.

The same logic applies to everyday decisions. An offer to buy a house that you keep open for 24 hours while you think has option value — the ability to act later if you decide to, without committing now. Many offers are time-limited precisely because the seller wants to reduce your option value: a 30-minute deadline eliminates the value of waiting and forces an immediate decision under pressure.

Recognising that your option to decide later has positive value reframes the decision about when to decide. Deciding now is not always free — it forfeits the option value of waiting. Sometimes paying the option value (by deciding later) is worth it.

The Status Quo as a Choice

When you do not decide between A and B, the default outcome — whatever happens without your active intervention — takes effect. This is not neutrality; the status quo is itself an outcome, and choosing it by inaction is a choice with consequences.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser's 1988 research on status quo bias showed that people systematically overweight the status quo relative to alternatives — they require stronger reasons to change than to maintain the current state, even when change is objectively preferable. Not deciding therefore often implies implicitly choosing the status quo.

This means that the question "should I decide?" must consider: "what happens if I do not decide?" If the status quo is acceptable or even preferable, not deciding is not a failure. If the status quo is worse than available alternatives, not deciding is an implicit choice to accept the worse outcome.

The Difference Between Deferral and Avoidance

The critical distinction is between reasoned deferral — waiting because waiting adds value — and avoidance — waiting because deciding is uncomfortable, regardless of whether waiting adds value.

Reasoned deferral has a specific expectation attached: "I will decide when X becomes clearer" or "I will decide after checking Y." It has a time horizon and a condition that will trigger the decision. It is strategic inaction.

Avoidance has no such structure. It is postponement without a trigger condition, maintained by discomfort with commitment rather than by the value of waiting. The test: if you asked yourself "what information would I need to decide?" and you cannot answer, the delay is avoidance, not deferral.

Sometimes the Answer Is Actually Maybe

Some Yes/No questions genuinely warrant a Maybe — not because the decision cannot be made but because the answer is legitimately conditional:

• "Are you coming to the event?" — "Maybe, if I finish work in time." This is not indecision; it is an accurate statement of a genuine contingency.
• "Should we pursue this strategy?" — "Maybe, pending the market research results." This is deferral pending information, not paralysis.
• "Do you want to move cities?" — "Maybe in a year or two." This is appropriate time-horizoning for a major life decision.

The cultural pressure to produce binary Yes/No answers to questions that are genuinely conditional or time-dependent is itself a source of bad decisions. Forcing a binary commitment when a conditional answer is more accurate produces false certainty and over-commitment to positions that should have remained provisional.

Using a Random Tool Knowingly

When you use a Yes/No wheel, you are exercising one of several legitimate options: deciding randomly, which is optimal when options are genuinely equivalent; or using the result as a preference-revelation tool — and overriding it if your reaction reveals a preference. The wheel's output is not binding unless you choose to let it be. That choice — to accept the random result or to override it — is itself an act of deliberate decision-making, informed by what the random result reveals.

Spin the wheel →