behavioral economics
lborkowski | January 27, 2011Gym regulars might grumble when classes and locker rooms fill with resolute new members each January, but the crowds rarely last long. I'm sure many gyms' revenue models depend on members who pay monthly fees but use the facilities infrequently, if at all. These people (and I've been one in the past) are essentially throwing money away by not going to the gym, but that doesn't seem to be enough to get them out of bed and into spinning class at 6am. The rewards of better fitness are much more distant than the allure of another half hour of sleep.
The Boston Globe's Susan Johnston reports on a…
ddobbs | April 10, 2009Via Tyler Cohen's Marginal Revolution comes this amusing anecdote -- and, perhaps, helpful example -- from the life of Peter Orszag, Obama's very brainy budget director. To motivate himself to train for a marathon, he somehow set up a penalty if he didn't hit his training targets: His credit card would make a contribution to a charity or cause he hated:
]"If I didn't achieve what I wanted to, a very large contribution would automatically come out of my credit card and go to a charity that I very much didn't support," Orszag says of his training strategy. "So that was a very strong motivation…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009I've had mixed reactions to Gladwell's writing over the years: I always enjoy reading it, but in Blink, especially, when he was writing about an area I knew more about than in his other books, I was troubled not just by what seemed an avoidance of neuroscientific explanations of attention and decision-making, but by an argument that seemed to come down to "The best way to make decisions is the quick gut method, except when it's not." I was also troubled by ... well, I couldn't put my finger on it. But Joseph Epstein has:
Too frequently one reads Gladwell's anecdotes, case studies, potted…