Sublime

A good friend of mine in the office adamantly refused to overbill and consequently had an overall billing rate that was about 20 percent lower than the average. I admire his honesty, but when it was time to lay people off, he was the first to go. What kind of message does that send to the rest of us?

In their book, Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life,5 Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argue, with reference to domains as diverse as conversation, health care, laughter, education, charity, art, politics, and religion, that our motives are lower—more selfish, more self-deceived, more biologically driven—than we usually believe they

There is useful research that suggests that people consume more when everyone knows that the bill will be split, taking some advantage of their unsuspecting dinner partners, as Greg did with the expensive wine.11 This tendency to over-order when the bill is split evenly suggests that the best payment method is for everyone to pay for what they eat

The point is that in many aspects of life, the existence of a past investment doesn’t mean we should continue on the same path; in fact, in a rational world, the prior investment is irrelevant.

But it can also go the other way. What economics has missed is that adding an incentive—a fine or a bonus—may be subtracting something else, the individual’s sense of responsibility, or obligation, or intrinsic pleasure.

In practice, however, we don’t usually assign the same value to every one of our dollars. The way we view each dollar depends on which category we first linked this dollar to—or, in other words, how we account for it.

We experience the pain associated with a loss much more vividly than we do the joy of experiencing a gain. Sensing a loss as a result of the high price, the shoppers can’t help but put the carton back on the shelf. And it’s not only egg buyers who are affected by the pain of a loss. A group of researchers replicated Putler’s study among orange

Porque, ainda que não costumem comprar o prato mais caro do menu, as pessoas pedirão o segundo prato mais caro.