Egozcue, MartinFuentes García, Luis2026-07-172026-07-172026-01Egozcue, M., Fuentes García, L. Selecting among equivalent options: a superior rule to coin tossing in pairwise comparisons. Theory Decis (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-025-10117-010.1007/s11238-025-10117-01573-71870040-5833https://hdl.handle.net/2183/48895This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use (https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/policies/accepted-manuscript-terms), but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-025-10117-0 .[Abstract]: In traditional decision-making, when faced with a choice between two seemingly equivalent options, a common approach is to resort to a random decision, such as a coin toss. However, this paper proposes deterministic rules that outperform such stochastic methods by achieving the same expected value while minimizing variance. Furthermore, we demonstrate numerically that, for a reasonable number of choices, our proposed rule second-order stochastically dominates the coin-tossing approach. Consequently, risk-averse decision-makers may prefer our deterministic method over traditional coin tossing.eng©The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2026. Subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use (https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/policies/accepted-manuscript-terms).Pairwise comparisonsCoin-tossing strategyVariance minimizationDeterministic strategyRecognition heuristicSecond-order stochastic dominancejournal articleembargoed access