Monthly Archives: September 2023

It’s the way that you say that you do it

When essentially the same item is sold at different prices, framing matters – a lot – to how it is perceived. There is a classic behavioural economics finding from 1983 research by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler involving beer (I wrote … Continue reading

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Quantifying the priceless

(featured image: montage based on Patrick Gruban/Flickr CC BY SA 2.0) The benefits of decisions are sometimes hard to nail down and quantify, while the costs are almost always reducible to hard cash. That can lead to uncomfortable comparisons, but … Continue reading

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Reasonable emotion

Featured image: Brett Davis/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0 Peddlers of misinformation typically appeal to their audience’s emotions. But emotion also has a benign role in our cognition. How to spot the difference? You don’t need to look far for examples … Continue reading

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The mystery of intrinsic value

(featured image by Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels) Money is widely associated with value (the economics textbooks literally say it is a store of value), but that does not mean that all value can be expressed as a sum of cash. Despite recent … Continue reading

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The ethics of voluntary economic transactions

<featured image: Ron Lach/Pexels> Can voluntary transactions raise ethical questions? Yes, they can! It has just gone midnight and you are walking home from the station, down a dark and deserted street. Suddenly, a figure jumps in front of you … Continue reading

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