Rationalizing the “Irrational” Economists are famous for attempting to rationalize seemingly irrational behavior. One of the more extraordinary is Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy’s theory of rational addiction, in which they hypothesized that addicts plan their consumption of addictive goods. … Continue reading Misunderstanding irrationality
How Driscoll’s Reinvented the Strawberry One foggy May morning, the Joy Makers, a team of scientists employed by Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, gathered at its research-and-development campus, which is known as Cassin Ranch, in the small agricultural town … Continue reading Strawberries’s beauty contest
The sharing economy is failing for one simple reason – people can’t be trusted Earlier this month an article in the South China Morning Post underscored just how bizarre the world of business has become. A Chinese startup offering to … Continue reading Do not trust big corporations
This Is Your Brain on Architecture Sarah Williams Goldhagen was the architecture critic for The New Republic for many years, a role she combined with teaching at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and elsewhere. She is an expert on … Continue reading Embodied cognition
Vote for Ugly The first nineteen times that Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, ran for Congress, he won his seat with more than sixty per cent of the popular vote. That remarkable streak came to an end in 2012, the … Continue reading The beauty premium
About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract himself from the boredom of his day job as the president of a market-research company. “It was, … Continue reading Corporate visioning
The Feedback Card: Real-Time Budgeting for Real People Millions of Americans struggle to manage their complex finances, even with countless budgeting tools that exist to make the process easier. The myriad of features included in these kinds of tools can … Continue reading Providing feedback
