[your-nanny]

chains are predictable. less risky: your expectations are stable and accurate.

[meowface]

My experience with coffee chains is the chains are predictably mediocre or bad, and the small shops are less predictable but on average generally much better than the chains (with the occasional place that's a lot worse than the chains, but this is rare from my experience).

[your-nanny]

could be, but for risk averse people (most people) the variance matters.

[darkerside]

Expectations are more stable, but that doesn't mean the underlying product is at all stable and consistent.

[your-nanny]

I've a friend, a high end foodie. he proposes to use the big Mac as the international standard/reference point for burger quality. that would t be possible unless the big Mac basically tasted the same at pretty much every mc Ds

[tszymczyszyn]

This is a very strange point of reference for a foodie, as McDonald's burgers are not even remotely close to anything tasty.

[yellowapple]

And if those expectations are predictably and accurately poor?

[your-nanny]

it's just math. you have your typical concave risk averse utility function, and you measure the difference in expected utilities between a low variance option and a high variance option, feed into softmax hoila