Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

If anyone knows about having a lot on the line, it’s Jordan Walters of the Silicon Valley branch of the investment house Smith Barney. Jordan is exactly the kind of person you’d look for in a financial planner: he’s calm, he’s thoughtful, and he always takes the time to listen. As we sat down in his office and sipped from the minibar-sized can of a

When you think of car dealers: “The Effects of Supplier Fairness on Vulnerable Resellers” was written by Nirmalya Kumar, Lisa Scheer, and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp. It was published in the Journal of Marketing Research 32 (1995): 54–65.

It’s precisely because of the compounding effect of these two forces that students in Max Bazerman’s negotiations class at Harvard Business School would do well to hold on to their wallets when he introduces his “twenty-dollar auction.” They say it’s easy to take candy from a baby; Professor Bazerman has found that it’s just as easy to take money f

We experience the pain associated with a loss much more vividly than we do the joy of experiencing a gain. Sensing a loss as a result of the high price, the shoppers can’t help but put the carton back on the shelf. And it’s not only egg buyers who are affected by the pain of a loss. A group of researchers replicated Putler’s study among orange juic

Sensing that money was starting to slip through his fingers, the client developed an aversion to loss that was strikingly similar to Van Zanten’s. Like the captain who was preoccupied with getting back on schedule, the investor was blindly focused on getting back to even. Jordan realized that his client was so eager to make up for a loss that he wa

Two University of Zurich researchers were equally curious: The Swiss nuclear incentive study, titled “The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out,” was conducted by Bruno S. Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. It was published in the American Economic Review 87 (1997): 746–55. forty students sat with number 2 pencils:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3660.

workplace, read “Determinants of Perceived Fairness of Performance Evaluations,” by Jerald Greenberg, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology 71 (1986): 340–42. You can also read “Effects of Procedural and Distributive Justice on Reactions to Pay Raise Decisions,” by Robert Folger and Mary Konovsky, published in the Academy of Management Jou

Sitting in their plush offices, venture capitalists: The venture capitalist study, titled “Procedural Justice in Entrepreneur-Investor Relations,” is by Harry Sapienza and M. Audrey Korsgaard. It was published in the Academy of Management Journal 39 (1996): 544–74.