Minimax Regret Strategy in Interview Preparation

Given that the economy has partially shut down due to COVID and, as a result, the job market has become increasingly sparse, college grads are finding the job search more stressful than ever. I am a soon-to-be grad on the job hunt and I recently realized that my preparation methods for final round interviews are highly irrational, but that this is a fairly natural behavior. 

As you spend more hours preparing for an interview, the chance of an additional hour being the one that will swing the employer's decision in your favor decreases significantly. At a certain point the rational interviewee will realize that he/she has prepared for most possible interview questions and that the likelihood of receiving a question not prepared for and that holds a large bearing on the outcome of the interview is lower than the marginal cost of studying for another hour to prepare for even more potential questions. In a "Super Day" with up to 8 interviews, the likelihood of any one question having a significant bearing on the outcome is small. The marginal cost for the extra hour of preparation is the time and effort expended, and the opportunity cost of getting more sleep the night before or spending time on other work. The expected benefit of preparing for a job interview is the idea that you may receive a job offer if you answer all of the questions effectively. However, due to the lack of certainty and perfect information in interview situations (the interviewee does not exactly know what to prepare for), this threshold can seem ambiguous and scary. 

Due to a natural human tendency towards ambiguity aversion and my desire to find a job in a difficult job market, I have become an extremely inefficient minimax regret strategist when it comes to interview preparation. A minimax regret strategist would prepare for as many potential questions as possible, greatly surpassing the threshold where MC > MB. A minimax strategy is one that minimizes the maximum regret. In an interview prep situation, I would suffer from maximum regret if I am unprepared for a question that I could have anticipated and easily spent an extra 30 minutes preparing for, and if this results in my not getting an offer. There have been many situations where I have done essentially everything I can to prepare, however, I still choose to continue to spend time preparing so that I can walk away from the interview feeling zero regret if I do not receive an offer because I did everything I could have with the time I had to prepare.