Best practices in choice modeling are not arbitrary conventions. They exist to protect information sufficiency — a property of the evidence itself. Information sufficiency asks whether there is enough relevant, identifiable information in the data and design to support meaningful inference.
When best-practice recommendations are viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that they serve different purposes. Some are designed to terminate questions that cannot be formally answered, others reflect constraints imposed by methods or tools, and others simply enforce baseline execution quality. These differences matter because each type protects information sufficiency in a fundamentally different way — and fails in different ways when mistaken for a decision guarantee.
Inquiry-Terminating Best Practices
Inquiry-terminating best practices are fixed, non-conditional rules that bring inquiry to a close in situations where deeper questions of sufficiency cannot be resolved within a shared analytical framework. They typically appear when conditional reasoning is acknowledged in principle but cannot be translated into actionable criteria.
Key properties:
- non-conditional by construction
- weakly linked to decision requirements
- operate as epistemic stopping rules
Their value is pragmatic rather than inferential: they constrain scope, reduce deliberation costs, and enable forward progress. However, they do so by limiting exploration rather than resolving the underlying uncertainty.
As such, their function is to terminate inquiry, not to provide guidance tailored to the decision context.
Tool-Constrained Best Practices
Tool-constrained best practices arise from the capabilities and limits of software, estimation methods, and diagnostics rather than from the requirements of a decision.
Key properties:
- shaped by what is implementable
- often defensible but incomplete
- become risky when mistaken for decision constraints
These practices are real constraints, but they operate at the level of execution, not sufficiency.
Hygienic Best Practices
Hygienic best practices are baseline competence requirements that improve execution quality without claiming to ensure decision safety.
Examples:
- clear attribute definitions
- feasibility checks
- piloting and comprehension testing
These practices are necessary but never sufficient.
Why These Distinctions Matter
Failures occur when question-terminating or tool-constrained practices are treated as guarantees of decision safety. Analytic governance exists to prevent this category error by explicitly assessing information sufficiency.