- Many people believe that the United States continued its futile war in Vietnam because we had invested too much to quit…. Every thousand lives lost and every billion dollars spent made it more difficult to declare defeat and move on, in Staw’s view. Some supposedly irrelevant factors can matter quite a lot. (1) – page 49
- This health club bills its members twice a year. Gourville and Soman found that attendance at the club jumps the month after the bill arrives, then tails off over time until the next bill arrives (2) – page 49
- Then we gave students a choice. “You have been paired with two students who played [the Dictator Game] but were not selected to be paid. One, E, divided the money evenly, while the other, U, divided the money unevenly. He took $18 and gave his counterpart $2. You have the following choice. Would you like to evenly split $12 with U or $10 with E?”… Fully 81% of the subjects chose to share $10 with a “fair” allocator rather than $12 with an “unfair” allocator. (3) – page 96
- Lisa Cameron ran Ultimatum Game experiments in Java using both low stakes and truly high stakes (approximately three months’ income for the subjects). She found virtually no difference in the behavior of Proposers when she raised the stakes (4) – page 96
- a large proportion of people can be categorized as conditional cooperators, meaning that they are willing to cooperate if enough others do. People start out these games willing to give their fellow players the benefit of the doubt, but if cooperation rates are low, these conditional cooperators turn into free riders. However, cooperation can be maintained even in repeated games if players are given the opportunity to punish those who do not cooperate. As illustrated by the Punishment Game, described earlier, people are willing to spend some of their own money to teach a lesson to those who behave unfairly, and this willingness to punish disciplines potential free riders and keeps robust cooperation rates stable. (5) – page 98
- Of those who began with a lottery ticket, 82% decided to keep it, whereas of those who started out with the money, only 38% wanted to buy the ticket. This means that people are more likely to keep what they start with than to trade it, even when the initial allocations were done at random (6) – page 100
- Those who got the mugs were reluctant to sell them; the median reservation price for sellers was $5.25 in each of the four rounds. But those who did not have a mug were not eager to buy one; the median reservation price for buyers was $2.75 in one round and $2.25 in the others (7) – page 103
- texting patients to remind them to take their prescribed medications (in this study, for lowering blood pressure or cholesterol levels) reduced the number of patients who forgot or otherwise failed to take their medications from 25% to 9% (8) – page 130
- In reality, across the entire draft, the chance that the earlier player will be better is only 52%. In the first round it is a bit higher, 56%.† Keep that thought in mind, both as you read the rest of this chapter and the next time you want to hire someone and are “sure” you have found the perfect candidate. (9) – page 183
- Before automatic enrollment, only 49% of employees joined the plan during their first year of eligibility; after automatic enrollment, that number jumped to 86%! (10) – page 202
- the most effective message combined two sentiments: most people pay and you are one of the few that hasn’t. This letter increased the number of taxpayers who made their payments within twenty-three days§ by over five percentage points (11) – page 214
- In a study in Ghana, the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action ran a randomized control trial testing whether text message reminders to take malaria medication helped people follow through with the medical regimen. Not only did they find these texts to be effective, but they also found that the most effective messages were brief; it was the reminder, not any additional information, which mattered. (12) – page 217
References
- Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action
- Payment Depreciation: The Behavioral Effects of Temporally Separating Payments from Consumption.
- Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics
- Learning in High Stakes Ultimatum Games: An Experiment in the Slovak Republic, Raising the Stakes in the Ultimatum Game: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia
- Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiment, Altruistic Punishment in Humans, The Nature of Human Altruism, Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment., Conditional Cooperation on Three Continents
- Willingness to Pay and Compensation Demanded: Experimental Evidence of an Unexpected Disparity in Measures of Value
- Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics
- Randomised Trial of Text Messaging on Adherence to Cardiovascular Preventive Treatment (INTERACT Trial)
- The Loser’s Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft
- “Plan Design and 401(k) Savings Outcomes, Optimal Defaults
- The Behavioralist as Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance
- The Impact of Text Message Reminders on Adherence to Antimalarial Treatment in Northern Ghana: A Randomized Trial