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Harvard Business Review: Stop paying executives for performance
Two business-school researchers have published a literature survey in the Harvard Business Review that makes the case against using performance-pay to motivate senior managers. (more…)
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Clicking "Buy now" doesn't "buy" anything, but people think it does
In What We Buy When We "Buy Now", a paper forthcoming in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, respected copyright scholars Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle report on an experiment they...
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Behavioral economist on why Americans freak out when you attribute their...
Cornell economist Robert Frank drew the ire of the nation's business press when he published an article that said something most economists would agree with: hard work and skill aren't enough (or even...
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A taxonomy of unethical technology design patterns
Tristan Harris, formerly Google's Design Ethicist and Product Philosopher, delves into the way that technology design can "hijack your attention," by introducing casino-like intermittent reward; by...
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Video: Guarding the Decentralized Web from its founders' human frailty
Earlier this month, I gave the afternoon keynote at the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web Summit, speaking about how the people who are building a new kind of decentralized web can guard against...
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1 in 5 snoop on a phone belonging to a friend or loved one
In Snooping on Mobile Phones: Prevalence and Trends, a paper presented at SOUPS 16, computer scientists from UBC and the University of Lisbon show that a rigorous survey reveals that up to one in five...
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How to protect the future web from its founders' own frailty
The speech was very well received -- it got a standing ovation -- and has attracted a lot of discussion since. Jonke Suhr has done me the service of transcribing the talk, which will facilitate...
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Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security...
In Workarounds to Computer Access in Healthcare Organizations: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?, security researchers from Penn, Dartmouth and USC conducted an excellent piece of ethnographic...
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Bernie Sanders on Brexit: urgent lessons for the Democrats
In a powerful op-ed in the NYT, Bernie Sanders warns the Democratic Party that Brexit shows that many of the left's traditional supporters justifiably feel abandoned by the neoliberal establishments...
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A catalog of weird-ass corners of game theory research
Game theory is the place where politics, economics, psychology and math meet, and it offers the seductive promise of being able to quantify empirically optimal outcomes from thorny problems ranging...
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Highest-paid CEOs generate lowest shareholder returns
In Are CEOs paid for performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives, a new study from MSCI, researchers compared the salaries of 800 US CEOs of large and medium-sized companies to the...
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Dark Patterns: why do companies pursue strategies that make their customers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=1KVyFio8gw4 In this 30 minute video, Harry Brignull rounds up his work on cataloging and unpicking "Dark Patterns," (previously) the super-optimized...
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Using Benjamin Franklin's behavioral economics maxim in magic
When Benjamin Franklin wanted someone to like him, he'd ask that person to do him a favor, because he noticed that people who'd done him a nice turn would rationalize this by assuming that they'd done...
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Dan Ariely: The Corruption Experiment
https://youtu.be/2KyavuKmdNE Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, set up an experiment to measure dishonesty using a coin and a six-sided die. Conclusion:...
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Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them
Jonathan Stray summarizes three different strains of propaganda, analyzing why they work, and suggesting counter-tactics: in Russia, it's about flooding the channel with a mix of lies and truth,...
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How Big Tobacco invented Donald Trump and Brexit (and what to do about it)
Economist Tim Harford (previously) traces the history of denialism and "fake news" back to Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook, which invented the tactics used by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns...
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India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research blew so much money on...
CSIR-Tech is the commercial arm of the Indian government's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research; after spending ₹50 crore (about USD7.6M) pursuing more than 13,000 "bio-data patents" (patents...
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Game theory: pedestrians versus autonomous vehicles
Any well-designed self-driving car will be at pains to avoid killing people, if only to prevent paperwork delays when they mow someone down. (more…)
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20 years ago, Ted Cruz published a law paper proving companies could always...
You might think that when companies impose crappy, abusive terms of service on their customers that the market could sort it out, by creating competition to see who could offer the best terms and thus...
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"One price to all" has been the default since 1840, but online retail is...
Since the earliest days of ecommerce, analysts have predicted that retailers would use their estimations of their customers' willingness to pay to invisibly, instantaneously reprice their goods,...
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Teller on how magicians "alter your perceptions"
Teller, the silent half of the Penn & Teller magic act, explains seven cognitive biases that magicians exploit in order to "alter the perceptions" of their audiences and achieve impossible-seeming...
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The strange, mutating story of "willpower" and what we think it might be as...
"Willpower" began as an element of philosophical/theological arguments, used to explain riddles like how humans could commit sin even though they were created by a perfect, all-powerful god -- but it...
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The copay assumes the 99% treat healthcare like spiteful buffet gorgers
The basis for the health-insurance copay is that the 99% need to be disincentivized from "abusing" their health-care and going to the doctor for frivolous ailments (if this was really a thing, we'd...
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The psychological design tricks McDonald's uses to tempt you into buying its...
McDonald's deploys a number of design tricks that are intended to tempt you to buying from its more expensive, higher-margin new menu: they're largely trivial and obvious (putting up big pictures of...
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MIT has an open course in winning at Texas Hold 'Em
https://youtu.be/62nDLA_A8gs MIT's How to Win at Texas Hold 'Em is a CC-licensed open course taught by Will Ma in 2016 and now free to watch online; the game is the perfect combination of psych and...
View ArticleWealth is correlated with greed, dishonesty and cheating -- are these effects...
There's a wealth of psychological research that correlates wealthy people in the real world with negative traits like rudeness (people driving fancier cars are less considerate of pedestrians and...
View ArticleInternet users are wising up to persuasive "nudge" techniques
Every now and again, a company will come up with a product "innovation" that seems to deprive people of their free will, driving great masses of internet users to look for Pokemon, or tend virtual...
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Gun stocks fall after news of coronavirus vaccine
On Monday, November 9, Pzifer announced that their trials of a coronavirus vaccine had been 90 percent effective. That's good news! But as Reuters reports, this news was a bummer for stockholders in...
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Behavioral brain teaser: Which of these buttons should you press for the best...
"You are only allowed to press TWO times — to receive a potentially nice monetary award," writes Cliff Pickover. "Which buttons do you press, and in what order?" buttons: ptashka/Shutterstock Check the...
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