We study Nature's trade-off when endowing people with the cognitive ability to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes. Our key premise is that cognitive ability is a scarce resource, to be deployed only where and when it really matters. We show that this simple insight...

We use a simple cost-benefit analysis to derive optimal similarity judgments - addressing the question: when should we expect a decision maker to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes? Our key premise is that cognitive resources are costly and are to be deployed only...