This is really impressive, this works each time. Especially if you are on ski slopes and you have two groups trying to meet at a given point. 10 minutes == "We can do another run or two". 8 minutes == "We need to pay attention, they are coming right now!"

Suggests people think of their commute as 20 plus a few minutes but rounding down optimistically, or think of it as almost 30 minutes rounding up angrily, never think of it as 27 minutes.

No writeup of the commute data has mentioned this phenomenon, which I suspect was exactly the same thinking you describe.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

    15 to 19 minutes . . . 14.9%
    20 to 24 minutes . . . 14.1%
    25 to 29 minutes . . .  6.6%
    30 to 34 minutes . . . 13.9%

// Noticed this while researching for a comment on HN a few weeks back.

Unless you're talking to a child who has not yet internalized this distinction! My kid frequently asks exactly how much time has passed, and I sometimes have to explain that I don't mean five minutes literally, but figuratively.

They just round more than you: I think your presumption that others should think like you is bizarre. Some people only round to 10 cents. If you are wealthy enough, you could easily round 10.99 to $0.

What I actually wrote was "bizarre to me", not just "bizarre" (as in your quote), so I don't think it's fair to say that my comment conveyed such presumption

But I live in a very dense city (Chicago), it’s become almost “set your watch to it” reliable that not only are estimates more reliable from friends who live here when they say “I’ll be there in 8 minutes”, they’re also seemingly more likely to offer such a precise estimate because they know the area, light timings, and traffic patterns and that certain kind of behavior found among drivers in this city.

Compared to when I have friends from out of town renting a car they’ll tell me “GPS says we’ll be there in 10 minutes” I instinctively add another 10 and it’s never failed that they’ll show up and go “that was a long 10 minutes!” And I just smile.

It was practically a given that the first time someone visited they would arrive 15-20 minutes later than they estimated. It seemed like an area without a lot of traffic but it was in that uncanny valley where there’s enough traffic where you catch a lot of lights, and you aren’t turning right on red because there are people in front of you, and you may or may not make the left turn light on the first cycle.

Also the whole city is so tuned for one direction of traffic that it takes longer to go across the narrow dimension than the long one.

There was a movie theater that I found I could reliably get to faster on a Friday evening if I drove five blocks past it and doubled back, the lights were that screwed up. 15 blocks faster than 5.

One would, but the little I've seen & heard about due dilligence around M&A (and startup investments for that matter) tells me it's nothing close to "quant". People decide they want to buy something, and then try to get it for a good price, and try to have it so that due dilligence works to reduce the purchase price, while not actually finding anything to block the deal. Perhaps in public company acquisitions there's more sophistication, but I really doubt that.

That's indeed how it works in my experience. Thay's also why, as a seller, you want to invest a lot of time making sure that the due diligence scoresheet will be as clean as possible - because then, there can be no mechanical way for a prospective buyer to lower the price: only their belief against that of other prospective buyers...

Here's a sales secret: this is how most people and businesses buy things most of the time. Key stakeholders (which may not be the big boss) decide they want something then find reasons to justify it. They'll only abandon the deal if there are true blockers either on price or features. And by "big boss" that can be a parent, spouse, Director, CxO, Board, etc. The buyer decides they want a thing and will set about convincing whoever needs convincing. The more you can make them engage emotionally the harder they'll go on securing approval.

If you're a startup selling to companies have one or two impressive "wow" features to make people decide emotionally they want your product, even if they don't seem like important "bread & butter" core features. It makes the rest of the process a lot easier.

Same goes for selling to consumers or even app videos/screenshots: sell people on your product emotionally within the first 5 seconds if you can.

This is accurate.

For public companies, the quant part has been calculated by the market. Everything that remains is, almost by definition, in the realm of the irrational, unknowable and/or political (usually at the Board level, though government factors could also be involved).

And then you go on to say "everything that remains is ... in the realm of the irrational", everything you have laid out is in the realm of the irrational. Including the market.

This discussion devolves into useless semantics if we rely on colloquial definitions. In case it wasn't clear, the predictable, explicable parts of a public company's value are generally priced in by the market. (If they're not, we're in a chaotic environment and nobody's doing classic M&A.) It's the other stuff, which we put in a bucket titled "irrational," M&A bankers address.

This is why the cash-flow models bankers prepare are largely performative. Every buyer builds their own models. And most of the time, the market does the modeling for them. The part the market can't model, the things one seeks to do with control, is the main attraction.

I caveated the comment because private company M&A is different. There, the negotiation does focus on valuation. Quality of assets. Current cash flows. Strength of contracts. Discount rates tied to the actual cost of financing versus an MBA model. While public company M&A dresses financial strengths and weaknesses in the language of partnerships, private company M&A seeks to address political issues (e.g. a senile founder with voting control) through talk of fundamentals.

The other side is also not necessarily irrational, but much less deterministic. For example, there is the question if the board even wants to sell, if they like the potential buyer, if they have a vision for the company that aligns with the buyer and some non-tangibles. Charisma projection and speech-craft definitely has an influence too, as has track record.

The more factors are in alignment with the board, the closer the price is to the stock value. The more hostile the negotiation, the more it moves away.

An econ 101 trope about the value of stock ties it to the value of future dividends. This is technically correct, but practically useless. You don't get those dividends unless the Board gives them to you, and investing on the hope that a Board throws you candy is just a hair short of stupid.

The real enforcer of value in the markets is M&A. In M&A, you become the board. If there are cash flows, you can take them. If there aren't, you can't. You're playing a game of looking for things the market and/or management missed or couldn't access. Furthermore, the moment that process starts, the moment negotiations become public, smart people focus on the stock to anticipate those terms. If they think another buyer could see cash flows you don't, they'll bid it up and the Board will take the signal (as will those other buyers and their bankers); if they don't, if post announcement the stock keeps trading below the bid, the Board will take the hint.

It's Musk, so you can throw out the book. He just takes the stock value and then tweaks it so that the offer contains 420 because obviously that's his shtick since some time.

Wonder if the SEC will ever live that one down.

Musk's Twitter takeover is a textbook LBO transaction. The negotiations were unorthodox. But that's been true of LBOs since the 80s. Usually the bankers were the ones up to the antics; this time it's the principal.

Yeah, if I say €193,345 and they say €1 million, that last five euro would look a little stupid. This is a scenario where already being close to knowing their closing figure is everything.

The proper analysis here would be: What's the chance you get your <1% edge versus losing a deal by being stuck on a number too early?

If you're a manager involved in some bidding process, what this article is telling you could be somewhat loosely rephrased as "use the Excel numbers rather than the ones that stuck in your head after the presentation", which is interesting advice.

In general it's the buyer who names a price first. Take the current Twitter acquisition, the board weren't trying to sell the company at all and Elon Musk made an unsolicited bid of $54.20/share.

Other times the board may be actively looking for a buyer and have a price in mind, but it will still typically be up to the buyer to propose a deal. Not least because the number isn't the only thing being negotiated: the buyer will likely have a range of stipulations or conditions attached to the bid so every bid will look different.

> are close it's one thing and if they are far apart it's another. Are

> rounders losing because their estimates are less accurate, relative their counterparty's?

I belive it is normally the one with the most optimistic evaluation that wins. It is called "winner's curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse

Is the presumption that a "quant" bases their decision on logic alone and that's why they wouldn't be susceptible so social psychology? Maybe someone with more background can elaborate but I think behavioral psychology might refute that assumption.