Coin Flip - Heads or Tails?

Coin Flip is the first ever truly random coin flip app for the iPhone and Apple Watch. The concept is pretty simple really, you shake your phone or tap your watch and the coin flips. You will see a cool video of a coin flip and then boom you have the answer to a question.


WHY FLIP A COIN?

DECISION MAKING

The average adult makes 35,000 decisions per day (Source: Sahakian and LaBuzetta). Decision fatigue causes irrational trade-offs in decision making (Source: Baumeister

Flipping a coin or "Flipism" is a normative decision theory that prescribes an course of action with the minimum possible cognitive overhead to make the decisions. Truly rational decision-making requires a tremendous investment in information and cognition to arrive at an optimal decision. However, the expected marginal value of information gathered (discounted for risk and uncertainty) is often lower than the marginal cost of the information or processing itself. The concept of bounded rationality posits that people employ cognitive parsimony, gathering only what they expect to be sufficient information to arrive at a satisfying (or "good enough") solution. Flipism is therefore a perfectly rational strategy to employ when the cost of information is very high relative to its expected value. (Source: Wikipedia)

DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Coin tossing is a simple, well known, and unbiased (in theory) way of settling a dispute or deciding between two or more arbitrary options.


WHY NOT USE AN ACTUAL COIN?

PREDICTABLE

Experimental and theoretical analysis of coin tossing has shown that the outcome is predictable, to some degree at least, if the initial conditions of the toss (position, velocity and angular momentum) are known (Source: Wikipedia).

BIAS - NOT A 50/50 CHANCE

A Stanford Study analyzed the natural process of flipping a coin and found a bias based on the angle between the normal to the coin and the angular momentum vector. This results in a 51% chance of the coin coming up as it started.

APPLE PAY

You no longer need a physical money, and carrying coins is a pain.

EVIDENCE

The Coin Flip app allows you to take a screenshot with a time stamp thereby providing evidence of an outcome that can be shared remotely.