Tag Archives: Decision-making

Beyond value for money: lessons from a broken-down car

(Featured image: cottonbro studio/pexels) Economic transactions like purchases are often treated as exchanges: you pay someone money and get goods or services in return. But is the only thing that matters that the benefit outweighs the cost – that you … Continue reading

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The amoral universe

(featured image: Hubble ESA/Flickr CC BY 2.0) Is morality, literally, just a figment of our imagination? Every parent will, sooner or later, experience clashes between their beliefs, and those of their children. The first such clash in my life happened … Continue reading

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Don’t confuse the facts with the truth

(featured image via DALL-E 3) We should be careful not to take our interpretation of the facts as the objective, unequivocal truth. A good 20 years ago, Frédéric Brochet, then a PhD student oenology (the study of wine), was cataloguing … Continue reading

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Factual misinformation

(featured image via Dall-E 3) We can be misled by false information, but we can also be misled by information that is the 100% unadulterated truth. And we ourselves are doing the misleading… These days, there is a lot of … Continue reading

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What enables us to change our mind

We have two mechanisms that help us make decisions. Even if they oppose each other, they can serve us well, especially for reconsidering choices made earlier What do a fictitious character from a radio soap, and two politicians – one … Continue reading

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Economic thinking in the real world

(featured image: Marius Arnesen/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0) Economic thinking can help a lot with everyday decision making, but some choices are beyond its capability. Or are they? Many of the decisions we make – from the trivial to the … Continue reading

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What I really, really want (and how badly)

(featured image: <money.jpg> photo: Pictures of Money/Flickr CC BY 2.0) One of the cool functions of money is that it allows us to express our preferences in a remarkably refined way by means of our willingness to pay – but … Continue reading

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I should be so lucky

(Featured image: Jacqui Brown/Flickr CC BY SA 2.0) How can we estimate the importance of the role of luck on individual success? Andrew Carnegie was an exceptionally lucky man. The fortune he amassed, adjusted for inflation, amounted to about $310 … Continue reading

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Evil does not take sides

Featured image: Pandemonium by John Martin The hardest, and the most significant choices we make are those that involve good and evil. Those are also the choices that signal the clearest who we really are. There is no getting away … Continue reading

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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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