Interesting Government Nudge
Do you think this will work to get people to stop texting and driving?

Do you think this will work to get people to stop texting and driving?

Fascinating new research sheds light on why so many people stick with dull jobs over trying something more exciting: They don’t expect to get paid enough to justify going after the more interesting options. Research into “effort aversion“ by Duke University Fuqua School of Business marketing professor Peter Ubel and David Comerford, an assistant professor at Stirling University found that in…
Pizza is pizza, and a full stomach is a full stomach. But when restaurants slice pizza into smaller pieces, you are probably likely to consume less pizza:
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The Wall Street Journal article linked below discusses why changing behavior may take more than the kind of nudges some behavioral economists have been promoting. As Lehrer points out, this is an idea I have been pushing (but not shoving, of course!) for a while.
Is ‘Nudging’ Really Enough? – WSJ
My Center at CBDSM regularly posts what we call the “Decision of the Month.” Our most recent DoM highlights some research I conducted with Sarah Gollust, a UM graduate student now working at Penn. Click on this link, http://www.cbdsm.org/doms/diabetes-lobby, to find out what happens when people learn about how neighborhoods influence people’s health. …
In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov tells a story about a PR agent who was trying to create some buzz around a topic. No one seemed interested. And then the agent had an idea: “I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to…
There was a very nice piece in the Washington Post recently, exploring the relationship between life satisfaction and the minimum wage. They summarize their findings in the following figure: I suggest you read the piece, to see what they make of this connection. Importantly, they explicitly mentioned that correlation does not prove causation. Unfortunately they…