Who has a more viable path to nomination? Clinton or Obama?

Both Senators Clinton and Obama are genuinely hopeful of securing the nomination of the Democratic Party as its candidate for the presidential contest in the fall.

In a purely rational world, Obama's hope appears more reasonable -- he is leading by insurmountable margin in the delegate count, the only measure that matters to secure the party's nomination.

However, human beings do not evaluate their options (sometimes called prospects) in that simple rational frame work. Two behavior psychologists (Kahneman and Tverskey, 1979) discussed this at length and proposed a new theory to explain choices made by human beings -- the psychologists argued and showed that human beings evaluate their choices based on their own experiences and (subjective) reference frame, and not on some objective and external frame. Kalyanaram and Little (1994) demonstrated the application of this theory to marketing, particularly, to how consumers perceive pricing.

The prospect theory explains the doggedness of the Democratic party presidential nominating contest.