We revisit the competency trap and reexamine when it occurs. We show that a bias against alternatives that improve with practice does not require that learning is myopic in the sense of lacking foresight or failing to explore. The same bias occurs even if learners engage in substantial exploration and have foresight. In fact, we demonstrate that even a rational and foresighted learner, who follow an optimal strategy for balancing exploration and exploitation, will learn to prefer alternatives with initially high payoffs that decrease with practice over alternatives, with identical expected values, that have initially low payoffs that increase with practice. Our results show that a bias against alternatives that improve with practice is due to an asymmetry in error correction rather than to myopic learning. The implication is that a wide range of selection systems, even optimally designed ones, will be biased against late-bloomers.

中文翻译：

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重新审视能力陷阱

我们重新审视能力陷阱，并在发生这种情况时进行重新检查。我们表明，对因实践而改善的替代方案的偏见并不要求学习是缺乏远见或无法探索的近视眼。即使学习者进行了实质性的探索并具有远见，也会出现同样的偏见。事实上，我们证明，即使是一个理性且有远见的学习者，他们遵循最佳的勘探与开发策略，也将学会偏爱最初收益高，随着实践而减少的替代方案，而不是那些期望值相同，初始收益低的替代方案。随着实践的增加。我们的结果表明，对替代方案的偏见随实践而改善，这是由于错误纠正中的不对称而不是近视学习引起的。