This article empirically investigates the common assumption of economicagents' capabilities to process complex mathematical problems to findoptimal strategies applied in economic modelling. By exploiting a designdifference in the game show Jeopardy between the US and Sweden, weobtain a natural experiment of individuals facing an optimization decisioneither having explicit information or deriving it by noncomplex adding andsubtracting. Given the assumption that individuals compute optimally,there should be no difference in the strategies used. Yet, the results showthat even a small change in informational pre-conditions for obtaining anoptimal strategy strongly alters economic-decision making.