Wait
Summary
Partnoy, a law professor and former derivatives banker, argues that delay is systematically undervalued and that most decisions improve when the decider waits until the last responsible moment. He organises the book by timescale, moving from decisions made in milliseconds to those made over years.
At the fastest end he examines professional athletes returning serves and hitting fastballs, showing that the best performers are not faster at initiating movement but better at delaying commitment until the last possible fraction of a second. He extends this to high-frequency trading, where he argues that speed competition has produced a market structure with costs that exceed its benefits. In the middle range he covers apologies, arguing that immediate apologies often fail while delayed ones with adequate acknowledgement succeed; medical decisions, where waiting produces better diagnoses; and negotiation, where the party who can wait holds the advantage. At the longest range he discusses procrastination, distinguishing the harmful kind from the deliberate deferral of tasks whose requirements are not yet clear.
His general procedure is to estimate the total time available for a decision and then to act at the end of that period rather than the beginning, because information accumulates while the deadline approaches.
The book covers a lot of territory and the connections between the domains are asserted rather than demonstrated. Some of the underlying psychology research has been affected by the replication problems that hit the field after 2011. The high-frequency trading material predates several structural changes in market design, and Michael Lewis's Flash Boys covered similar ground with more reporting two years later.
Key takeaways 7
- Expert performance in fast physical tasks comes from delaying commitment, not from reacting more quickly.
- The correct procedure is to identify the total time available and then decide at the end of it rather than at the beginning.
- Immediate apologies frequently fail because they arrive before the injured party has been heard.
- Speed competition in financial markets has produced costs to market participants that exceed the benefits of faster execution.
- Delaying a decision allows information to accumulate, and that information is usually worth more than the cost of waiting.
- Some procrastination is functional because it defers work on tasks whose requirements have not yet stabilised.
- Systems designed to force immediate responses degrade the quality of the decisions they produce.
Who should read it
Decision makers under time pressure who want an argument for deliberately deferring commitment, particularly in negotiation and hiring.
About Frank Partnoy
Law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and former Morgan Stanley derivatives salesman writing on derivatives, fraud and regulation.
F.I.A.S.C.O. describes structured-derivatives selling from inside the desk that did it, naming how the trades were priced and why clients kept buying them. Infectious Greed and The Match King follow the same incentives through the accounting frauds of the 1990s and the 1920s.
University of San Diego, Morgan Stanley, University of California, Berkeley
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