Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian

If you want the best odds of getting the best apartment, spend 37% of your apartment hunt (eleven days, if you’ve given yourself a month for the search) noncommittally exploring options. Leave the checkbook at home; you’re just calibrating. But after that point, be prepared to immediately commit—deposit and all—to the very first place you see that beats whatever you’ve already seen.

finding an apartment belongs to a class of mathematical problems known as “optimal stopping” problems.

(A mathematician might say you have access only to the ordinal numbers—the relative ranks of the applicants compared to each other—but not to the cardinal numbers, their ratings on some kind of general scale.)