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Sourcery · 2 min · Oct 26, 2026
People choose based on the alternatives actually available
Behavior depends on the options people can actually choose from, not only their abstract preferences. Opportunity cost helps explain why stated intent can lose to sleep or another meeting.
Joon Sung Park is cofounder and CEO of Simile.
Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery
Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.
About this segment
Behavior depends on the options people can actually choose from, not only their abstract preferences. Opportunity cost helps explain why stated intent can lose to sleep or another meeting.
From “The $2B AI Startup Simulating Human Behavior with 85% Accuracy”, Oct 26, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“Optionality and the type of optionality often really governs people's behaviors.”
Takeaways
- Real choices include alternatives absent from abstract surveys.
- People weigh opportunity costs, not just stated preferences.
- An extra hour of sleep can beat a plan to exercise.
In this episode
Full episode- 8:52Simile tested digital twins against real people2:17
- 11:22What people do can differ sharply from what they say2:22
- 33:31An EV message risked hurting the whole category2:23
- 22:50Representative panels need sampling and consent safeguards6:41
- 42:25Randomized tests show which levers can shift behavior2:40
- 15:44Simile can model a market, not just its customers2:41
- 3:55Smallville tested whether agents could form unscripted behavior2:56
13:37People choose based on the alternatives actually available2:04
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 13:42
What is the number one or the most common indicator of human behavior? Like what are those traits or things that you've noticed create the reactions or events? What causes people to do things? Why would someone make a decision versus not? Like what are those? How do you determine if someone will continue a pattern or not? So it turns out what this actually has to do sometimes actually is the existence of optionality.
- 14:14
So let's actually briefly take a look at how psychologists would usually study human behavior in a survey. We have an abstract question and we have basically a certain set of options that were presented in multiple choice questions or on a likely scale of one to seven. That's a very confined space. But when people behave, they don't usually behave in vacuum or in an abstract conditions. They often behave in the real world, right?
- 14:42
And what that basically means is even simple questions like, where do we want to go eat? In abstract, if somebody said, hey, let's go eat X, the odds are if I'm really hungry, in fact, if I'm very hungry and if there's no food available, I'd almost certainly say, yes, let's go do that. but what often ends up happening is we do not have access to certain options but we have access to other options this is where people have this optionality so they now they have to think they have to think about the opportunity cost of taking that option so that's actually what really governs people's behavior that yes I can go exercise this week but if I don't I can sleep for one more hour or I can take one more meeting. It's these kind of things. Optionality and the type of optionality often really governs people's behaviors. Do you pull a lot of data from dating