Links - 19th January 2020 (1)

Coupons: Timing is Everything : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Coupons are effective for a very different reason… different from just saving money… a lot of people, when they enter a store, they don't really know what they want to buy. And they are really trying to find some sort of a help, a guide to help them to decide what they were going to buy in the store… they actually find reasons to help them to decide what they were going to buy. So in particular, there was one experiment where we gave this coupons to people either just at the entrance to the store or inside the store…. we found that this coupon was very successful. A lot of people redeem the coupon when they received the coupon when they enter the store’...
‘Isn't this kind of standard economics that if you give people a discount, they will just spend more?’
‘Well, I mean, technically speaking, that shouldn't actually affect how much people want to spend, especially, you know, if the intention is actually to spend much more, right’...
‘If you gave people a discount by saying spend $3 get $1 off, people spend less than they would?’
‘Exactly’
‘And it's because they're stupid and not understanding and they could actually spend more and still get the dollar discount?’...
‘They’re really trying to find some sort of an anchor, if you will.’
‘Okay. So when people are coming into the store, they don't know how much they're going to spend, they look for some kind of rule. And this coupon is acting as a rule. And even if it's a rule that says spend $3, get $1 off, is all $3! Let me spend $3... But you said this, what happens when they come into the store? What happens if they're in the store a;ready?’
‘If they're in a store already, you know, this, people have already more or less decided, you know, what people are going to buy… even 30 seconds or a minute after they have stepped into the store. I mean, those coupons will still not be as successful if they received them at the entrance to the store.’
‘So if you give me a coupon before I enter the store, they're successful. If you wait until I enter the store and look around, presumably I made already some decisions and then I'm not influenced by the coupon?’
‘That's right... These customers, they go through a particular process, right? So over the course of the shopping, you know, the goals in the store actually becomes more and more concrete. Right. So that probably means that when you're trying to catch this customers and make them spend, then the best time to actually catch them is when their goals are still not concrete yet, which is at a time when they enter the store.’"

The Invalidity Of Interviews Arming The Donkeys podcast - "‘Random information made it worse but at the same time increased people's confidence’
‘The random interview as opposed to an accurate one didn't make people worse or better… any interview in this case made people worse off’"

Overcoming Overconfidence : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We often think that men are more overconfident than women. Do you find evidence for that?’
‘We actually don't... all of the studies that we have conducted we have never found gender differences actually in overconfidence’"

How Money Grows : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "The fact that people think that money grows linearly over time rather than exponentially means that they think that they can wait to start saving later"

A New Use for Search Tools : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We search, let's say, Chile… how many documents talk about Chile, how many of them talk about Chile and corruption’...
‘The fraction from that gives you and then you have a ratio of cheating to importance of the country.’
‘That's right. So let's say there's 1000 documents about Chile and five of them talk about corruption. It's five over 1000 for Chile... our measure of corruption correlates very highly with the gold standard of corruption with the Transparency International corruption index, the correlation is that something like point seven... There's a lot of things social scientists cannot observe and this allows them to observe it. So for example, even though there are ranking of corruption for countries, there is none for cities at the United States’ level. And so we could we compile the first index ever of corruption at the city level in the United States… if I remember correctly, Chicago [was high in the list], New Orleans, Los Angeles. San Diego, actually, it's pretty high... we think it can be used to control for all sorts of things in social science studies where you cannot observe a given variable. So let's say you want to control for how capitalistic different cities are... we've toyed around with the idea of trying to predict demand for it. So let's suppose the new PlayStation was coming up and you want to see how much how much buzz there is about the PlayStation in different cities... if you search sunshine in Seattle, there's a lot of articles about it. And there are articles about how much not sunshine there is in there. So you want to be careful about that’"

Taking Comfort in Change : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The economic environment changes, my job changes, I move city, I'll have the same food that I've always had, because that's kind of at least one constant thing. And that's the theory that people have about what they will do’
‘That's right, they'll want mom's old meatloaf recipe, the common chocolate chip cookie, they'll surround themselves with familiar things, like you say in the areas that they can actually control.’
‘And do they actually do it when the time comes?’
‘No. And that's the interesting thing from my research is I found that people will predict that that's the way they'll behave. But then in choice, they don't… They actually choose more exotic new things. So the more people are in a state of upheaval or change, the more likely they are to choose an unfamiliar, exotic new option rather than their old favorite... I think it's because when we do a lot of changing we're in the state of, of constantly having to make new decisions and new choices. So we're open more to the new options in our environment, you can call it kind of a change mindset. And when we're in that mindset, we notice the new and we are a little more attracted to the new than than before.’"

Why Do Guys Give? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We have male and female subjects who are interacting with the robot. And so one prediction is it's a robot, nobody wants to give any money. Another prediction is maybe they'll give some money, but why would you care if a robot is male or female? It's not really male or female. It's a robot. But what Mikey's intuition was, is that I bet people will respond to this robot as if it were human in some sense. And then the question is, well how would men, male and female participants respond to a male and female robot?’...
‘So the guess, of course, is that men, men love women and they would give, if they think they have a chance with the robot, they'll give the robot more money.’
‘That's exactly right. So women don't care if the if the robot is male or female, they give a little bit to the robot. And men act as though just in case maybe the female robot will sleep with them. They better be extra nice to the female robot.’
‘Now, do men give more money in general?’
‘No. So in fact, men give less money to the male robot than women give to the male robot but they give way more money to the female robot.’
‘So the women basically don't distinguish’
‘You know, there was a paper a while ago that examined how long people wait when they drive off a parking spot when another car is waiting for them. So imagine you're parked in your somewhere and another car is waiting. And what they find is that men take longer when another car is waiting for them. Not if it's a good car, like men have respect for cars. Women take longer when somebody is waiting for them, regardless of what, what's going on, they don't discriminate’"

Monkeys' Consumer Choices : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘They go ahead, they learn how to shop for cereal, then they see a bulletin board for two weeks that is either McDonald's or Burger King. You switch it for two weeks to say the same thing. And then all of a sudden the same choice appears again… they see a bulletin board and they go for the same thing they've seen’
‘Very small effect. So if you compare it to the size of an effect about making McDonald's cheaper, so if you can get two pieces of cereal from McDonald’s… it's about a quarter of the size of a price change.’
‘Okay, but this is a big price change. I mean, if you talk about doubling the price, and this is a quarter of that it's basically as if you increase the price by 25 cents’...
‘However advertising works it's pretty dumb. These models that say it's all about the information and the price you're getting and so on, that can’t be what's going on in the monkeys. It can’t be something about brand loyalty and so on.’
‘Or at least it says that you don't need that. I mean that it works even at the dumber level... it even works at a very basic level. On top of it, you can have other effects as well.’"

Fowl Behavior Observed : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On homosexual necrophilia in ducks] ‘I took my camera, my notebook, my pencil and I I started to do what I was trained, observe and make notes. And it took a long time, this behavior went on and on till I had seen enough, up to 75 minutes... That's long, normally it's within a minute.’
‘Really. So this was not just a homosexual necrophilic duck. It was also a homosexual necrophiliac duck with some particularly impressive stamina like a professional athlete’
‘Well, I think it's a matter of getting no response and no feedback and just went on… I secure the dead duck because I'm a curator in the Natural History Museum. So I wanted to have the dead duck for our collection... It's a famous duck now. This is the first ever recorded victim of homosexual necrophilia. There's only one... I wanted to establish the if there was any family relationship between the two. Could be a father and a son or a grandfather and a [grand]son. But it was before the time of DNA analysis in birds. So we, I simply forgot to take semen samples and blood samples... What a shame’
‘Now these study became very, very famous. You've got a lot of press. Why, why do you think in particular this studies seemed to touch such an important nerve with society?’
‘Well, because necrophilia is taboo, but because there are ducks involved., it opens doors and everybody wants to hear the story and it's not dangerous because there's no humans involved.’...
‘And what about homosexuality Do you think that's also a part of that?’
‘Well it's kind of widely accepted now that there is homosexual behavior in all kinds of animals ranging from elephants to insects. So that's not the, that's not a real debacle’...
‘Do you feel that you would have gotten the same excitement if it was a heterosexual necrophilia?’
‘It gave a special flavor to the behavior.’"

How We Adapt : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Adaptation... think of a massage. A massage is fantastic when it starts. And after five minutes, it's still good, but it's less so. You're getting used to it, if you will... one of the things that you can do to sort of sustain the enjoyability is to disrupt the experience, to put a little break in the middle so the massage goes for a few minutes, and it stops, then it comes back. And those disruptions make the experience feel more intense for a longer period of time... [but] everyone says, of course, I want to continuous massage...
‘Another thing I like about their paper is that they report that you never really get used to a death of a child. But you do get used to the death of a spouse. So kind of a sad perspective, right?’...
'One of our findings in it is basically when you import this to the idea of watching TV, you say, oh, the television program is great, but it'd be even better without these ads. And we argue that's at least in some circumstances, wrong, that TV ads because they disrupt it, make it better… they're locally annoying right? At any given moment you'd of course rather watch the show than the ad. But if I look over the last hour, how much did I enjoy my life, at least in our experiments, and again, we predict this would happen in a lot of situations, the ads make things look better because the program gets so much better. And that's the dominant experience over the last hour'...
‘He's dating a woman that's doing her medical residency. And the reason that makes his relationship work great, is she is just incredibly busy a lot of the time. And it means that there is no period where they spend five consecutive days together, it just isn't possible. And because of that, he's always thrilled to see her and she's always thrilled to see him.’"