Sublime

Sam had no talent for coding—the two closest friends he’d made at MIT were both coders, but he still couldn’t tell a good coder from a bad coder. About trading all he knew was that he was not obviously unqualified to do it. He dropped his résumé with the firms looking for traders. It still felt like a lark. “Someone told me that a lot of physics ma

The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he

Good policy uses incentives to channel behavior toward some desired outcome. Bad policy either ignores incentives, or fails to anticipate how rational individuals might change their behavior to avoid being penalized.

Livingston: Did you use the same strategy with other companies: "Try us out for a month, and, if you feel like we've driven some true leads, you'll continue with us"? Kaufer: Yes. Once other companies saw Expedia advertising, they sometimes didn't need a free test, but we might say, "Look, our leads are normally a dollar a click, bec

many people love lotteries. Some governments are already using this insight.

people are not as selfish as economists thought them to be,

For example, when Thaler asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a fifteen-dollar calculator, 68 percent of respondents said yes. However, when he asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a $125 leather jacket, only 29 percent said they would.

In other words, some of those who were automatically enrolled would have chosen a higher savings rate if they had been left to their own devices.