Example
Consider an employer attempting to choose between two candidates offering to complete a task at the cost of $10 / hour. The length of time needed to complete the task may be longer or shorter depending on the skill of the person performing the task, so it is in the employer's best interests to find the fastest worker possible. Assume that the cost of another day of interviewing the candidates is $100. If the employer had deduced from the interviews so far that both candidates would complete the task in somewhere between 195 and 205 hours, it would be in the employer's best interests to choose one or the other by some easily-applied metric (for example, flipping a coin) rather than spend the $100 on determining the better candidate, saving at most $100 in labor.
In many cases, the decision may be made on the basis of heuristic; a simple decision model which may not be completely accurate. For example, in deciding which brand of prepared food is most nutritious, a shopper might simply choose the one with (for example) the lowest amount of sugar, rather than conducting a research study of all the positive and negative factors in nutrition.
Read more about this topic: Rational Ignorance
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“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)