Time To Choose Your Health Insurance: Don’t Make A $9,000 Mistake

Is there any financial decision that we dread more than the annual chore of choosing a health insurance plan? It’s got everything we hate: choice and information overload, time pressure, ambiguity and confusion, consequences worth thousands, uncomfortable scenarios involving disease and injury, inscrutable jargon coming at a time of the year full of other business, … Read more

Will ‘Decisive’ Make You A Better Decision Maker?

“Do you know what you want?” Those six, dreaded words haunt my otherwise happy memory of a meal my friends and I enjoyed to celebrate graduating from university. It seemed such an important occasion: I wanted to get my menu selection exactly right. You can imagine the groans around the table after the third or fourth postponement … Read more

Trust Me! Why You Need To Understand Trust, and How To Earn It (Part 2)

As we explored in my last article about Victor, the appliance repairman, trust is increasingly necessary and valuable in modern life. At the same time, trust is getting scarcer as well-publicized betrayals in business and government add up. What is Trust? But what is trust? The dictionary defines trust as the “Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.” … Read more

Interview: Michelle Gilmore on Behavior-Centered Design

We were delighted to have Michelle Gilmore, Design Director and Founder of design firm Neo, speak at a recent Behavioral Economics-NYC meetup about her cutting-edge work in the design of products, services and systems. Her presentation led to a lot of interest and discussion among those who were there and particularly among those who missed out. … Read more

Ariely Redux: Dollars and Sense Explains How We Make Money Mistakes

Dollars and Sense is an enjoyable, non-technical overview of some of the ways we make bad money decisions and a few ways we can get better.  The primary author, Dan Ariely, is a well-known behavioral economist who has written extensively about how predictably irrational we can be. The other author is a comedian  (with a middle-aged white-guy sensibility), which … Read more

Make Any Decision

Behavioral Economics (BE), a mash-up of psychology and economics, originally interested me because it promised a way to understand and predict mistakes that people make. This helped me do a better job as a banker to governments and nonprofits, because I could help them (and me) avoid those mistakes. It took a while for me to … Read more

Nudges: For Your Own Good?

What do classical music in the train station, binge-inducing pre-loaded TV show episodes in Netflix, and those “I voted stickers” you get after voting have in common? Read our latest article, “Nudges: For Your Own Good?” about how government and businesses “nudge” your behavior for your own good…or maybe not (5 minute read).

Taking the Red Pill: Into the Decision Matrix

Do you want a simple and easy tool for making an important decision? The simplest “tool” is a heuristic. A short-cut like “take the default” or “do what everyone else is doing” may be fine for selecting a restaurant entrée or route to the grocery store. But what about more important decisions like taking a … Read more