  The author addresses the thermodynamic stability of braneworld cosmological
solutions of five-dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, particularly in
the context of the splitting vacuum thin shells analysed in Ref. [Class.
Quantum Grav. 35 085004 (2018)], where the shells represent either an ephemeral
or a branch-changing false vacuum bubble spontaneously emerging from the
braneworld, and there is more than one possible solution for the same
distributional initial data set. The free energy associated with the competing
solutions is computed. It turns out that the criterion to decide which solution
is preferred coincides with the criterion of the possibility of having a
splitting solution. This result suggests an equivalence between a thermodynamic
and a dynamic selection criteria among possible solutions that deserve further
consideration.
