A new study has revealed that moral victories may spare one from losing next time.
The findings based an analysis of two decades of data on NBA coaching decisions focused on whether coaches adjusted their personnel following games where the margin of victory or defeat was small.
Brennan Platt, a professor of economics at BYU and co-author on the study said that a blowout win was informative about the team's future success, compared to a crushing defeat, but losing by a point versus winning by a point, most of that was just noise and to say 'a win is a win' ignored important information in the intensity of the win, causing narrow losers to overreact and narrow winners to be satisfied.
Platt said that a lot of the goals businesses set were related to zero/one outcomes and things that were out of their control should be accounted for before one started evaluating staff.
The study is published in the journal Management Science.