Sublime

Choice architects (such as Carolyn the cafeteria director) have many opportunities to choose defaults, and they can do so in ways that are self-serving or welfare enhancing.

Generally, people make good choices in contexts in which they have lots of experience, good information, and prompt feedback—say,

programmers

One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people often adopt what we call the “yeah, whatever” heuristic.

This is the law of Diminishing Marginal Returns: if you hold everything else steady, ratcheting up one input (in this case, money) has less and less impact on the desired output (happiness), to the point where it becomes ineffective, and sometimes even does more harm than good.

it. If the default fund is terrific and can work well for most participants, or if the choosers are likely to blunder, then it might make sense to encourage people to select the default. If the creators of the default fund are not really experts, if the choosers know a lot, and if the situations of different choosers are relevantly different, then

Behaviorally informed regulations from the Federal Reserve Board prohibit banks from making overdraft protection the default option when opening a new account. That is a reasonable initiative, but as we have seen, default options are not always sticky.