Sublime

“We are going to take things from each other if we have a chance . . . many people need controls around them for them to do the right thing.”

Money is not the only attribute that is easily used for points of comparisons.

Bernoulli observed that most people dislike risk (the chance of receiving the lowest possible outcome), and if they are offered a choice between a gamble and an amount equal to its expected value they will pick the sure thing. In fact a risk-averse decision maker will choose a sure thing that is less than expected value, in effect paying a premium

Start-up tech companies with no revenue are regularly valued to be worth hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars, and we act surprised when they don’t live up to these expectations. Some people go on a $10,000 vacation but spend twenty minutes each day looking for free parking. We comparison shop for smartphones. We think we have an idea of

But let’s be careful not to fall for false effort. We ought to watch out for too much transparency. If a consultant shows us all the great pains they have gone through to produce nothing but their $100,000 fee, reconsider. If a Web page is just a progress bar and a “Pay Now” button, keep searching.

the story of Feldman’s bagel business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics. Yes, a lot of people steal from him, but the vast majority, even though no one is watching over them, do not.

The most impressive effect was on how much they spent in the micropayment condition, where they were forced to think about the payment every time prior to purchasing (paying during). In this condition, the average participant spent just 4 cents.

These results suggest that once someone (or some organization) does us a favor, we become partial to anything related to the giving party—and that the magnitude of this bias increases as the magnitude of the initial favor (in this case the amount of payment) increases.