Behavioral economists have written a lot about sunk costs. The idea is pretty simple: once people have invested in an effort – in time or money – they stick with that effort longer than is otherwise justified. They don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their investment, so they continue to invest even when pulling…
As a physician who conducts research on decision-making, I have been asked many times: What does behavioral economics teach us about the role of living wills in medical care? Famed behavioral economist Dick Thaler recently opined on this topic in the New York Times, stating his support for a “requirement that all patients meet with their…
Recently Mayor Michael Bloomberg learned that his Big Gulp ban had been blocked by a state Supreme Court judge for arbitrarily targeting these consumer goods without a legal rationale. Determined to combat the obesity epidemic, Bloomberg will no doubt appeal this decision. But he shouldn’t. Instead, he should look back at the history of alcohol prohibition…
Now that states have decided what they are going to do about health insurance exchanges—those new shopping carts created by Obamacare to help consumers find health insurance who do not get it through their employers—the really tough part begins. State and federal governments need to make sure that consumers understand their health insurance choices. You…
A dozen years ago, my wife filled out an NCAA bracket on a popular website. Out of more than 1 million entries, she finished somewhere around 17th. Think about it: 17th out of a million. Clearly I married up! I mean everyone says their spouse is one in a million, but how many really mean…
One of the dangers of studying behavioral economics and psychology is that the ideas follow you around pretty much everywhere you go. I was reminded of that when some of my students came back from a mid-class bathroom break to tell me they thought the toilet levers were not well designed, environmentally speaking. At Duke,…
Notice anything unusual about this CT scan? On the upper right side is an image of a gorilla. According to a new study, 83% of radiologists missed this image. They had been looking through a series of scans, looking for “pulmonary nodules”—growths in the lung, in other words. The early scans included such nodes, and…
In a 1967 experiment, psychologists trained pigeons to peck a red key to get food. (Pigeons were huge back then, research wise!) Then they tested whether the pigeons could learn to delay gratification. They set up the pecking booth so that those pigeons who waited a little longer before pecking the red key would get…
Imagine you are 17 years old again and applying to college. You have your heart set on Stanford, but know it’s a long shot. Your well-meaning aunt, aware of your interest in that fine Palo Alto institution, buys you a Stanford sweatshirt. Would you wear it before you found out whether you had been accepted? ……
Republicans and Democrats agree that Medicare is in trouble – that if its costs keep rising faster than inflation, we will face insurmountable federal budget deficits. They also agree that the problem can be fixed. But that is where their agreement comes to an end, and where the Democrats hold a psychological advantage over Republicans……