Sublime

as pessoas raramente escolhem coisas em termos absolutos.

overstating billable hours by economic consultants.

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:

1 In other words, our brains don’t like unfairness and this dislike makes us take action to express our displeasure.

the €100,000 offer, but at least you won't leave empty-handed. The upshot of all this is that you badly miscalculate the risk. You keep on chasing after the possibility of a big gain because you can't accept the prospect of a loss. Your emotions have sabotaged common sense. Loss aversion is an innate flaw. Everyone who experiences emotion is vulner

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like, t

One conceit of economics is that markets as a whole can perform fairly rationally, even if many of the participants within them are irrational. But irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives. So long as most traders are judged on the basis of short-term perform

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEALS

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.