One could specialize in a certain skill and then trade the products of that skill for other goods.
Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things:...
If you live in a social world, as we all do, you are always being hit with information about how others are doing.
If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.
If people want real information, they have to go beyond advertising to disinterested sources such as Consumer Reports.
I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate—even eliminate—many of these sources of distress, but they aren’t easy. They require practice, discipline, and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the o...
Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society.
Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer,...
Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium...
But if you’ve been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a two opt...
But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber...
As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn’t work out. It might not oc...
As the magnitude of the gain increases, the amount of additional satisfaction people get out of each additional unit decreases. The shape of this curve conforms to what economists have long talked abo...
As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, Ads are what we know about the world around us.
According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.
When faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become pickers, which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choos...
The more our connections to others weakens. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this c...
Simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of th...
People won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.
People with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores.