Neuroeconomics

The menu designer for an Austin restaurant, Roll On Sushi Diner, must be a Neuromarketing or Brainfluence reader. A while back, I identified sushi-style pricing as being the worst possible approach because each tiny bite is a separate pain…

If you want to sell more product by running a sale, which would make more sense: advertising "price cut 33%" or "50% more" product? Functionally, the two are the same level of discounting. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found,…

Having demolished the belief that most people are rational in his last two books, Duke researcher Dan Ariely puts to death the concept that "most people are honest" in his newest book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to…

If I gave you $50 with the following two choices, what would you do? Keep $30. Gamble, with a 50/50 chance of keeping or losing the whole $50. An experimenter posed that question to subjects, and found that 43% of the subjects…

Business agreements are usually secured by written agreements that define the obligations of the parties and state what happens under various conditions. Having been party to a few business deals launched based mostly on enthusiasm and…

Nudge is all about choice architecture, a discipline which structures choices in a way that produces the most beneficial outcome. I don't have to tell Neuromarketing readers that humans often behave in conflict with the traditional…

Nobody is doing more to add to our knowledge of the irrational side of human behavior than Dan Ariely. Not only does he conduct experiments that are elegant in their simplicity, but he writes about his work and that of other researchers in…

A specific part of the brain responsible for making decisions about value has been identified by neuroeconomics researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Using fMRI, psychology professor Joseph Kable has shown that the…

Ask catalog or Internet retailers what a return cost them, and they will likely be able to cite some very specific numbers reflecting shipping costs, processing labor, damaged packaging, and so on. But it turns out there's a specific…

Book Review: Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Impact Your Business by Kay Yut Chen with Marina Krakovsky Economics can be dry stuff - remember "macro," "micro," and supply/demand curves? Fortunately, Secrets of…