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We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Dan Ariely

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Dan Ariely
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 29
Economist
Pedagogue
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Economic
Basic
Predictable
Decision
Mistakes
Random
Brain
Standards
Irrational
Less
Neither
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Wiring
Making
Behavior
Brains
Senseless
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Standard
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Assuming
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Mistake
Rational
Systematic

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We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.
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If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.
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Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
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The real issue is, how much goodwill do you invest in the work? And goodwill is not something that we can buy with money. It's very hard to buy goodwill with money.
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When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it - meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
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...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
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You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.
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Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.
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Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.
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Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
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The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake.
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When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.
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When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.
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The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.
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While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.
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Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.
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One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
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But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .
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With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.
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When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.
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