On Sunday, the Super Bowl once again served up a batch of funny, cool, and even moving commercials. For decades now, Super Bowl commercials have continued to impress and touch us with a car starting Darth Vader kid, a horse-befriending dog, a 1984…
A few weeks ago Reebok unveiled a walking shoe purported to tone muscles to a greater extent than your average sneaker. All you had to do was slip on a pair of EasyTone and the rest would take care of itself. Exercise…
Would you pay $76 for a shot glass? What about $52 for an oven mitt? And $50 for a jar of marbles? You may shake your head and say no way, but in a recent series of eBay auctions, the consumers did…
Change Begets Change This is how you put a positive spin on the recession. In a new study, Moore School of Business marketing professor Stacy Wood suggests that it’s in times of upheaval that we’re particularly inclined to leave our comfort zone…
The New York Times and Time Magazine have recently posted interesting articles about two new books that discuss consumer behavior: Chris Anderson’s Free and Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap (see links in The New York Times and Time Magazine). Both books reference our…
In a follow-up to the much acclaimed “Pinch of Saffron” , this latest Predictably Irrational Short Story is a thrilling Wall Street tale of overpricing CDOs, again written by one of my Behavioral Economics students, Andrew Holmberg. It’s entitled, “Fixed Income”, and…
I pleased to announce a new series of short fictional stories written by Duke undergraduate students who took my Behavioral Economics class this last spring. I will post another one of these stories twice a month for the next few months. The…
I got this suggestion from Thomas Aedy in Eton College in the UK: Dear Dan, The final for Britain’s Got Talent was on Saturday June 30th and this final was very interesting because it involved 3 choices, 2 of which were very…
Our prehistoric ancestors spent much of their waking hours foraging for and consuming food, an instinct that obviously paid off. Today this instinct is no less powerful, but for billions of us it’s satisfied in the minutes it takes to swing by…
I wrote this about 8 months ago — but it makes particular sense right now …. — If (as is often the case) talking about sex makes people more interested in having it, does that mean that the current talk about a…