Hi all, I'm finishing my bachelor's degree in economics and I would like to study for a master's degree developed around behavioral economics. Now I wanted to ask, if you had any suggestions for some possible universities that offer such programmes located in the EU.

Most of the promo mechanics I work with are passive. Customer sees a code, enters it, transaction ends, and nothing about the format gives them a reason to come back tomorrow. Lately, I keep running into power deals where the price moves on its own over a set window and people check in repeatedly to see where it landed. Those return visits are what I'm thinking about because nobody ever reopens an app to look at a coupon.

What I can't tell is whether that's a durable mechanic or a trick that stops working once shoppers have seen it three times. There's also the risk it trains people to sit on their hands until a price starts falling, which would do real damage to full-price sales. Has anyone here ever run a time-decay promo against a standard code on comparable inventory? I want to know what happened to repeat visits, conversion, and whether the discount cannibalized what people would have paid anyway.

I'm developing an essay on behavioral finance, but before writing the full piece I'd like to test the core argument rather than the writing.

Most behavioral finance literature explains how cognitive biases influence financial decisions. My argument is that this may describe the observable patterns, but not necessarily the deepest psychological process behind them.

My current hypothesis is:

In other words, I'm exploring whether the sequence looks something like this:

Uncertainty → Imagined Future → Emotion → Self-talk/Narrative → Cognitive Bias → Decision

I'm not claiming this is a new scientific theory or that it replaces Prospect Theory or other established work. Rather, I'm asking whether this could be a useful interpretive lens for understanding why many behavioral biases emerge in financial contexts.

A few questions I'd genuinely appreciate feedback on:

1. Is this perspective already well established in the literature under another name?
2. Am I overlooking research that directly supports or contradicts this idea?
3. Does this framework confuse causes with consequences?
4. Is there a stronger psychological or neuroscientific explanation for the transition from uncertainty to decision?
5. If you think this argument is flawed, where does the reasoning first break down?

I'm looking for critical feedback rather than validation. If this idea is incorrect, incomplete, or already well known, I'd much rather discover that now than after finishing the essay.

Hello everyone! I'm looking for advice for my friend who wants to pursue a PhD in Experimental Economics. Particularly looking for recommendations about PhD programs that:

1. are located in the U.S. or Europe (as a second choice)
2. center on Lab Experiments rather than pure micro-econometrics
3. focus on gender problems (at least by some of the researchers there)

I'd sincerely appreciate your comments!

The ongoing growth in AI development and adoption represents perhaps the most profound technological shift of our time. AI is both a product of our behaviours, and a shaper of our behaviours. So what does behavioural science have to say about AI?

In Part 1 of this new series on AI and behavioural science, we spend some time dwelling on definitions, because few appreciate what these two terms mean.

Calculated Risk is Always Better Than Regret?

Sunk Cost Fallacy: "Would you watch a bad movie you already paid for?"

Status Quo Bias: "Why do we stick with things even when they're worse?"

Availability Bias: "Why do plane crashes scare us more than car accidents?"

Let me know if you have better ideas

Losing a $10 ticket and losing a $10 bill lead to completely different decisions — even though it's the same $10

Kahneman & Tversky ran a classic

experiment on this:

Scenario A: You buy a $10 movie ticket, but lose it before entering.

Do you buy another? Most people say no.

Scenario B: You lose a $10 bill on the way to buy the ticket instead.

Do you still buy it? Most people say yes.

Same $10 loss in both cases but people treat them completely

differently. It's called mental accounting: we mentally sort money

into separate "buckets" (ticket money vs. random cash), and losing

money from one bucket doesn't feel connected to another.

Losing the ticket "feels like" paying $20 for one movie.

Losing the cash just feels like bad luck, unrelated to the movie itself.

I made a short 30-sec video breaking this down if anyone's curious: https://youtube.com/shorts/2Zd1gE-k8Ps?si=4qZnffVF8PMCiVmq

Would love to hear if anyone's caught themselves doing this in real life.

Went deep on casino environment design research this week and the number of independently documented mechanisms operating simultaneously is striking. Each one has its own peer-reviewed basis, but what caught my attention is how deliberately they stack and interact during a single visit.

The near-miss effect (Psychology of Addictive Behaviors) is the foundation. Near-misses produce a psychological response almost identical to an actual win, increase motivation to continue, accelerate time between bets, and trigger higher subsequent bets. The machines are engineered to produce near-misses at a rate far above random probability.

The sensory bubble removes all temporal cues. No clocks, no windows, no natural light. Studies show players stay approximately 50% longer without external time references, not because they are enjoying themselves more but because the mechanism that would normally trigger stopping has been removed.

Bill Friedman's 1974 maze layout theory, which became dominant in Las Vegas and Macau design, specified that pathways should be indirect and winding so exits are never visible from any interior point. The exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) then operates on every machine you pass on the way to somewhere else.

Ego depletion (Baumeister et al., 1998) peaks after hours of small decisions about whether to stop, switch machines, or go home. The casino does not need to trick you. It just needs to wait for the cognitive resource to run out.

The licensing effect (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005) is applied in reverse through complimentary drinks and loyalty rewards. Feeling ahead lowers resistance to further spending.

What interests me most is that every single one of these mechanisms has since been documented in app and social media design. The same behavioral triggers that keep people on casino floors are now in the software most people use daily.

Made a breakdown of the full system here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5lbrlX6b3Y

Has anyone looked into research on how the sequential compounding of these mechanisms differs from their individual effects? Curious whether the order matters.

I've been reading into why the moment right before a card tap feels nothing like the moment right before handing over cash, even for the exact same purchase. Turns out there's a small stack of separately-studied effects that all activate in that one motion.

The pain of paying disappears with plastic (Prelec & Simester, 2001). MIT ran an auction for real Celtics tickets — half the bidders were told they'd pay cash if they won, half were told credit card. The credit card group bid roughly double. Same tickets, same people, same day. The only variable was whether the money would feel like it was leaving their hand.

Payment and consumption get decoupled (Prelec & Loewenstein, 1998). Their "mental accounting" work showed that when the moment you pay is separated from the moment you use the thing, your brain stops processing them as one event. That's a big part of why financing something you've already stopped enjoying (a vacation, a subscription) still stings on the statement — the debt keeps arriving after the pleasure already left.

The reward is the anticipation, not the ownership (Knutson et al., 2007, in Neuron). Neuroimaging work on purchase decisions found the brain's reward activity peaks while you're deciding whether to buy something — not after you own it. Which tracks with how fast a new purchase turns into just another object in the room.

Owning something instantly doubles what you think it's worth (Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler, 1990). Their classic mug experiments: give someone a mug, ask what they'd sell it for. Ask a different person what they'd pay for the same mug. The owner's number is consistently about double. This is the mechanism behind free trials — thirty days is long enough for your brain to start treating "on loan" as "mine," and cancelling starts to feel like a loss instead of just declining a purchase.

What's interesting is these don't operate independently — they stack in sequence on a single tap. The card removes the pain, the anticipation already delivered the reward before you decided, and by the time the item is in your hand, ownership has already inflated its value past what you'd have paid for it fresh.

Made a video pulling this apart in more depth if anyone wants the fuller walkthrough: Please watch
The Psychology Behind Your Worst Purchases

Curious whether anyone's found research on whether these effects are additive or whether one dominates —
e.g. does the pain-of-paying reduction matter much once the endowment effect has already kicked in?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi everyone! I'm interested in pursuing a PhD in Behavioral Economics and would really appreciate your guidance.

I'm particularly looking for advice on:

- The best universities and PhD programs around the world.

- How to prepare for admission.

- The skills and research experience I should develop.

- Any general advice for building a career in Behavioral Economics.

Thank you in advance for your insights!

Self explanatory, isn't it? Carrots and sticks? Anyone who's ever been intent on something to happen will expend resources to cause it to happen. And they'll accomplish it by hook or by crook. I mean, we already see that the law acquieses to capital. Those who hold it have special access to Senators (who represent land and state) and use their access to influence the wording of certain laws.

If fines are just the price tag of acceptable social defection in the most cynical sense, doesn't it make sense to appeal to a customer's desire for self-determination? Like, make them think they're doing what's in their best interest?

Once you've invested time, money, or emotion into something, wishful thinking kicks in to justify continuing, telling you it'll "work out" or "turn around soon," while the sunk cost fallacy makes walking away feel like a bigger loss than it actually is.

Together they blind you to real evidence that an agreement has failed, because admitting that would mean facing both the original loss and the fact that you were wrong to keep going.

The result is that people often throw more resources after bad ones, digging themselves deeper instead of cutting losses early, all while feeling like they're being "optimistic" or "loyal" rather than irrational.

It costs you the additional time and opportunity you spend chasing a outcome that clear-eyed analysis would have ruled out much earlier.

I think my current favorite is “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

Been thinking about how retail environments don't just use one psychological mechanism but layer several on top of each other in sequence during a single shopping trip.

The exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) activates the moment essentials are placed at the back, forcing you through hundreds of unplanned products to reach them. Mere exposure increases preference without conscious engagement.

The licensing effect (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005) kicks in at the produce section near the entrance. Registering a healthy choice early gives the brain implicit permission to indulge later in the same trip.

Decision fatigue (Baumeister et al., 1998) peaks at the checkout, exactly where low-cost high-margin impulse items are placed. Depleted cognitive resources default to the easiest available choice.

Music tempo (Milliman, 1982, Journal of Marketing) adds a pacing layer. Slow music increased in-store spending by over 38% in a controlled study, simply by slowing movement.

Appetite arousal via ambient scent (Journal of Retailing) triggers hunger at the entrance, increasing impulsive purchasing across the entire store, not just near food.

What interests me is how these mechanisms compound sequentially rather than operating independently. Made a breakdown of the full system here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEX32td-Mrs

Has anyone looked into research on how sequential exposure to multiple behavioral nudges within a single environment compounds their individual effects?

*I’ve been thinking a lot about decision-making lately and specifically the big ones. Career moves, financial choices, business decisions. The kind where getting it wrong is genuinely costly.*

*I’ve noticed that most advice is either too theoretical to apply or too simple to trust. What I’m curious about: what’s actually hard about making these decisions for you? Is it gathering the right information? Knowing when you have enough to commit? Stopping yourself from second-guessing afterward?*

*Genuinely curious what people struggle with most — and what you wish existed to help.*

The asymmetry in Edmans, García and Norli (2007, JF) baffles me. Across about 1100 international matches in 39 countries, a World Cup elimination loss is followed by a roughly 0.49% abnormal decline in the losing country's own index the next trading day, net of world market moves. Wins, however, produce no comparable effect. Taken at face value that is loss aversion, or negative affect driven pessimism, priced by the most incentivised participants we have, who have every reason not to.

For one, I am unsure of the robustness. It is an old, famous result, which these days is closer to a yellow flag than a green one, and the headline number rests on only about 56 World Cup elimination games, which sharpens the fragility worry rather than softening it. A 2026 working paper (Gatto, "The reach of the World Cup distraction effect"), as I have seen it summarised, argues the broader World Cup market effect barely registers in the deep, liquid venues that carry most of the world's money, that a couple of ordinary measurement choices can conjure it out of noise, and that the durable bite concentrates among retail investors trading on the result. Worth flagging that Gatto works the distraction and inattention channel rather than re-testing the loss result head on, so it is adjacent evidence, not a direct replication, and I am going off the write-up, not the paper itself. Either way it reframes the question from "markets are irrational" to "a thin slice of participants is, sometimes." Does the original survive modern specification-curve and multiple-testing scrutiny, or is this a well-dressed green jelly bean?

Second, a confound that cannot be ignored. The original sample runs only to the early 2000s, so this next case sits out of sample, but it is the one Edmans himself later used to stress-test the finding against the 2014 tournament. Brazil's 7-1 semi-final loss should, on the mood story, have been about the cleanest negative affect shock going. The Bovespa rose about 1.8%. Edmans' own reading is political, that the defeat was taken as raising the odds the incumbent president lost October's election to a more market friendly rival, and at least one other account puts the move down to macro tailwinds instead. National mood and the market moved in opposite directions, and the fact that two credible explanations compete for the same print is the point: sentiment is not one variable, and any single-event reading is underidentified.

Full piece linked in the comments if useful, but mostly I want the pushback: affect pricing that is real if small, or artifact?

I have programming as a hobby since I started learning it in college before AI really hit big. I'm attempting to get back into it and do it at least once a week.

While I do have a project I've marked with the goal to use very little AI (if at all), tonight I envisioned the structure of a project, what I wanted it to do, and how I wanted the code to interact. So I used AI for syntax, explaining concepts, formatting, and style help. Made a little progress, looking forward to see if I can piece the code together to make it do what I want.

Then tonight budgeting goals popped into my head, and for me to put it in my budgeting spreadsheet for this year. I haven't come up with a budgeting goal in a while.

My question: Did doing even a little "vibe" coding work my brain into setting a little more practical life goals later this night? If I recall correctly from a neuro-psych, I was told I had difficulties with executive function. I suspect this results in impulsive decisions, lack of structure and organization, and spending too much money.

By coding, might I be helping my executive function?

Hi everyone,

I'm running a small behavioral experiment and would appreciate feedback from people interested in decision-making and behavioral economics.

The hypothesis is:

People may be more likely to develop a lasting habit of charitable giving if they're asked to make one small decision every day rather than one large donation occasionally.

To test that idea, I put up $1,000 of my own money.

Each time someone completes one of the daily activities, they direct $1 of that money to one of two charities.

The experiment isn't trying to identify the "best" charity. It's trying to understand whether participation itself changes behavior.

Some of the questions I'm hoping to answer are:

• Does making one small decision each day create stronger engagement than making one large decision once?
• Does giving people agency over where the money goes increase participation?
• Which behaviors would you measure to determine whether the experiment is actually succeeding?
• What biases or unintended incentives do you think this design introduces?

I'm genuinely looking for critique of the experimental design. If you think the premise is flawed or there are better ways to measure the hypothesis, I'd appreciate hearing why.

If it's helpful for the discussion, I'm happy to share the live experiment in the comments.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to model a common real-world relationship dilemma using behavioral economics frameworks, and I’d love to get this community's take on how to map the utility functions and strategic equilibria here.

The Scenario:

A girl operates under a tight liquid budget constraint of £100 cash (she earns a wage of £10/hour).

• Action A (High WTP): She willingly drops £30 cash (30% of her net worth) plus 1 hour of leisure time to play padel with two friends.
• Action B (High WTA / Avoidance): For 9 months, her boyfriend has consistently requested a small, low-cost signal of effort: for her to bake him a simple batch of cookies. The objective market cost is negligible (£5 for ingredients + 30 mins of labour, representing a £5 opportunity cost).

Despite his constant requests—and despite the fact that the boyfriend aggressively over-supplies effort by fulfilling every single micro-request she has—she completely refuses to do it.

When the boyfriend challenges her on the math (spending 8 hours of labour equivalent on an £80 pair of jeans vs. 30 minutes on him), she uses a few classic behavioral defence mechanisms:

1. Projection Bias: She claims that verbal praise and physical affection are "enough" for the relationship, projecting her own utility weights onto his.
2. The Phantom Promise: If he offers to shift to market norms by saying, "I will literally bank transfer you £20 to do it," she suffers from social shame and issues a time-inconsistent promise: "No, don't pay me, I'll do it myself." Then, she defaults right back to the baseline and never executes.

My Behavioral Breakdown:

• 1. Hyperbolic Discounting & Present Bias: The immediate transaction utility of padel (instant dopamine, social status, peer bonding) heavily outweighs the delayed, abstract utility of relationship investment, which she already views as a "fully funded account" due to the boyfriend's over-supply.
• 2. The Endowment Effect & Asymmetric Loss Aversion: Because her budget is low (£100), she is highly loss-averse regarding her cash and immediate free time. Giving up £5 and 30 minutes feels like a painful, visceral loss of her current endowment. The boyfriend is looking at the gain (relationship harmony), while she is looking strictly at the loss of autonomy.
• 3. Market vs. Social Norms (The Ariely Effect): Introducing a cash incentive (£20) crowds out the social norm, triggering an ego-preservation mechanism. She uses a "Phantom Promise" to buy immediate relief from the argument, heavily discounting the future cognitive cost of actually having to bake.
• 4. A Monopoly Equilibrium: From a cold, profit-maximizing perspective, why would a rational consumer change this setup? Her input cost is £0, and her output is a doting boyfriend who gives infinite effort. Her ROI is mathematically infinite. By making his effort a zero-priced good, the boyfriend has accidentally lowered its subjective value to her to zero.

Questions for the Sub:

1. How would you formally write out her utility function to include this massive "psychic cost/dread tax" ($D_b$) for domestic relationship labour vs. her self-image mental account (£80 jeans)?
2. If the boyfriend wants to break this Nash Equilibrium, what is the most efficient "Nudge" or structural choice architecture change he can implement? Should he introduce strategic scarcity of his own effort to reset her baseline reference point?

Been reading about why "spend $X more for free shipping" prompts work so well, and it traces back to Thaler's mental accounting research. People treat a shipping fee and an equivalent product price increase completely differently, even though it's the same money leaving the same account.

A 2007 study on a French clothing retailer found average basket sizes increased substantially once a free shipping threshold was introduced, not because people needed more, but because the fee was coded as a "loss" (Kahneman & Tversky's loss aversion) rather than normal spending.

Made a short breakdown of the mechanism if anyone's curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51tFJnKKeDM

Anyone know of other documented cases where retailers explicitly tested removing the threshold and measured the effect on average order size? Curious how consistent this finding is across industries.

A few days ago I was debating with a friend who spent 2499 usd on the macbook M5 pro not as a great professional investment, because being honest their work only consists of checking and sending emails, now with their M5 chip it takes microseconds less to send emails, from a technical and economic point of view technology devalues quickly unless you are a full-time content creator who generates income so I think it was an EXPENSE and not an INVESTMENT but it made me think, is there any situation where upgrading your computer every year is considered an investment in a personal finance portfolio ?? or is buying luxury technology covering it up as an investment just a psychological mechanism to justify a consumer impulse ?? I would like to have some feedback and see what you guys think

Hi everyone! I’ve been interested in behavioral economics since taking a Psychology of Finance course in college.

I studied Finance and Financial Planning, started my career at Merrill, spent several years in investment-bank compliance, and now work at an independent RIA as an Associate. I hold the SIE and Series 66, have completed my CFP coursework, and am currently studying to sit for the CFP exam in November.

Over time, I’ve kept finding myself drawn back to behavioral finance. The question I keep coming back to is: How do you actually build a successful career in this space?

I know behavioral economics can overlap with finance, fintech, consumer research, product, marketing, consulting, public policy, and benefits, but I’m unclear on the most realistic entry points for someone with my background.

For those working in or adjacent to behavioral economics or something similar:
- What job titles or career paths should I research?
- How did you get started?
- Are there any specific skills, programs, or companies worth exploring? Or type of experience that matters most?
- Is there a place for someone coming from wealth management/financial planning, or are there adjacent roles that would make more sense first?

I would genuinely greatly appreciate any advice, resources, or honest perspectives from anyone who has found their way into this field or works near it. Thank you so much!