Sublime

(Teaser rates exploit present bias.)

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

I was surprised by the increase in cheating that came with being one small step removed from money. As it turns out, people are more apt to be dishonest in the presence of nonmonetary objects—such as pencils and tokens—than actual money.

Look at poor Frank, a contestant on the Dutch version of Deal or No Deal. He gets off to an unlucky start by immediately eliminating some of the most lucrative briefcases. After six rounds, Frank has only one valuable briefcase left, worth five hundred thousand euros. The Banker offers him #102,006, about 75 percent of a perfectly fair offer. Frank

In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” they showed that men acted on their useless ideas

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.

Here’s the broader lesson: if people wrongly think that most people are committed to a long-standing social norm, a small nudge correcting that misperception can inaugurate large-scale change.

We think it is a vicious interplay of three factors, each as unfortunate as the last, each feeding and fed by the others. First: physics envy. This is well understood and is not an original insight. Second, a more specific, material effect of physics envy in this realm: It pushes academic economists to search for what can be measured and quantified