ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the costs of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different...
As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize,
UNLIKE OTHER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS—ANGER, SADNESS, DISAPPOINTMENT, even grief—what is so difficult about regret is the feeling that the regrettable state of affairs could have been avoided and that it cou...
The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that...
How people look is yet another thing that they are now responsible for deciding for themselves.
Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life
Aversion to losses also leads people to be sensitive to what are called sunk costs. Imagine having a $50 ticket to a basketball game being played an hour’s drive away. Just before the game there’s a b...
Americans spent about $27 billion on nontraditional remedies, most of them unproven.
Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.
The dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status.
If the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier.
Choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences,...
Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.
Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.
The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.
Taking care of our own wants and focusing on what we want to do does not strike me as a solution to the problem of too much choice. It is precisely so that we can, each of us, focus on our own wants t...
Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies.
Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves.
On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we’ll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive fe...
On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.