OB Research Seminar - Alex Odlum, HEC Lausanne

“Misfortunes never come singly” is a saying common in different languages and historical contexts. Could this proverb reflect more than irrational superstitions? We draw from two frameworks, the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach to decision making, and the rational analysis of cognition. The former prompts us to conceptualize the proverb as a simple but smart heuristic that may be adapted to statistical regularities in decision-making environments, and the latter offers a method for studying such environments. Analyzing the pattern of humanitarian disasters between 2000 and 2022, we find that the probability of observing a new disaster in a country increases with the frequency of new disasters observed in the previous 100 days in that country. We discuss how our approach can further research into the ecological rationality of proverbs. Our results are also potentially relevant to humanitarian analysts and managers, who seek to better anticipate crises and allocate resources effectively between existing and upcoming disasters.