And you are here why?

via The Globe and Mail , we get this comprehensive (and accurate!) Infographic .  Seriously, This is your brain on Behavioral Economics (click to embiggen quite a bit)

Felix Salmon and Rocky Agrawal both have their takes on the Uber fiasco. What?  You haven't heard of it?  Well, go read the above notes, but if you don't feel like it, the short version is that Uber is basically the luxury (uber) 'black car' service for the iPhone-ers. You request a car in an app, and pretty damn soon one shows up, no fuss, no muss.  Of course, its pretty damn expensive, but hey, thats what you pay for convenience, right?  The problem is what they call surge pricing , where they make the pricing dynamic at peak times (New Years Eve for example).  The pricing was, well, non-intuitive at best, and people got charged a bajillion dollars to just go around the corner. Caveat Emptor , right? Well, not really.  Felix and Rocky have somewhat different takes on this.   Felix believes that this is actually a behavioral economics problem, i.e. Uber is a great idea in theory, and the mechanics of it tend to work well in practic...

There is a Nice Q&A at Knowledge@Wharton with Rajat Paharia (of Bunchball fame) and Daniel Debow (of Rypple fame) on the rise of Gamification , and its relevance in the business world. Its worth reading the whole thing, but I was particularly struck by Rajat's point that this isn't something that is specific to the current 'gaming' generation - it is relevant across humanity as a whole. To quote directly from Rajat: ... it’s based on satisfying these fundamental human needs and desires we have for reward, status, achievement, competition, self expression, even altruism. Those things cross genders, they cross demographics, they cross any segmentation you want to apply. We’re all motivated by some combination of those ... I find that remarkably accurate - we are always, always unconsciously acting on these paradigmatic behaviors, and mostly not unconsciously , but instead, actively doing so (if only to suppress the same behaviors!).  Explicitly ...

I know, I know, its the easiest thing in the world to see this, sneer, and then feel slightly superior with the Inside Voice saying  I'd never fall for that. I know what marketing is . Except, you probably will fall for it at some point. In fact, you probably fall for it all the time, but just don't realize it. Its almost a reptilian hind-brain kind of thing - hardwired into our animal spirits.  For more information on this, read both of Dan Ariely's books   Predictably Irrational ,  and The  Upside of Irrationality This message brought to you from the World of Behavioral Economics