In a paper in Science, Jonathan Hall and Joshua Madsen proposed that dynamic signs that reported Texas road fatalities - “1669 deaths this year on Texas roads” - caused more accidents and fatalities. Recently, a friend mentioned the paper to me. I replied that I had seen the paper but didn’t believe the result. I wasn’t going to ignore the finding,...

In my last post I discussed how I would like to redo my article “Please Not Another Bias! An Evolutionary Take on Behavioural Economics”. Apart from the removing the weak experimental evidence that I referenced, I wanted to make a few points more explicitly, such as the need for theory. Well, that re-write is here in the latest edition of Works in...

In 2015 I gave a presentation titled “Please Not Another Bias! An Evolutionary Take on Behavioural Economics” at the Marketing and Science Ideas Exchange (MSIX) conference. I posted my presentation on this blog, where it had around 100,000 readers in the first month (a lot for this blog). A copy of the post was the most popular post on Evonomics in...

Last year I posted some notes for a course on Consumer Financial Decision Making. I have now refreshed those notes, but probably more usefully, also put them into book form using Quarto. Relative to this blog, which is built using markdown and Hugo, Quarto allows the incorporation of computation. It also allows for richer formatting and cross-referencing...

0. Introduction In December last year Katherine Milkman and friends published a “megastudy” testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000 experimental participants. But more than just testing these interventions, the long list of authors stated: Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how...

In a seminar for a team from an investment manager I described how base rates are often neglected when people are grappling with conditional probabilities. My description was somewhat confusing, so the below is a short write-up for the participants. – Consider the following question scenario. You test yourself with a rapid antigen test for COVID-19....