Reversibility-Enabled Exploration: Why People Try More When They Can Undo It

This conceptual paper introduces Reversibility-Enabled Exploration, a mechanism in which a credible opportunity to undo a choice lowers expected loss and enables exploratory choice. Others’ later reliance can make the same choice more costly or difficult to reverse. The paper distinguishes willingness to try from acceptance of permanent effects. It separates perceived and actual reversibility and recognizes that undoing a choice can leave some costs or effects intact. Uptake alone does not establish that people participated because they believed they could reverse the choice; that explanation requires comparative evidence. The discussion connects the mechanism to March’s account of exploration and exploitation and examines Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 remarks on China’s new stock markets. Deng presented the possibility of stopping as a reason to experiment. The paper uses Lan’s account of subsequent market growth to ask how later reliance could affect reversal. Part of the Shared Capacity and Learning series within On Human Modeling, the paper examines who offers a reversal, who can carry it out, and who bears effects that remain. Its framework can inform human–AI research on whether undo options change exploratory use and how dependencies formed during use affect the practical scope of reversal.