Decisions, Decisions

Not What to Decide, but How

by Dan Goldstein

Taxi Drivers Get Bigger Tips When Paid By Credit Card

New York City cabs now have credit card readers and touch-screen computers in the back. They present the passenger with preconfigured tip options, which start at 15%.What does this do to how much they get tipped? Read More

Can You Spot a Coincidence?

When does a coincidence deserve a shrug of the shoulders, and when does it suggest that something's amiss? Read More

Will Obama's automatic savings plans save the day?

The New York Times has an interesting article called Savings Accounts for All: Simple but not Easy, which talks of the Obama administration's plans to set up an automatic IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts) for workers in the USA. Read More

Let's find the world's best player of this game

Do you have brainy friends in your social network? We're trying to find the best players in the world at a game of skill and luck.

You know the rules from the last posts. Here's how the Palin-Biden showdown looks now that the election is over:

Sarah Palin Read More

How many rich and poor people are there in the USA?

Think you know it all? A good deal of decision-making research centers around people's abilities to make accurate estimates and inferences.

Those who like to test their knowledge might be interested in this fun video game / Web experiment put together by myself and Lionel Page. Read More

How to increase voter turnout by asking questions

Columbia University's Eric Johnson and Elke Weber have created Teachers4Turnout, a Web site / classroom activity to encourage voting among students.

Check it out at http://www.teachers4turnout.org Here's how they describe it: Read More

Sarah Palin vs Joe Biden: Round Two

Last time, we looked at whether the Internet thought that Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were considered good or bad choices. This week, the completely unscientific and undoubtedly flawed investigation continues as we look at how things stand 25 days later.

(Disclaimer: This is just for fun. I'd have to think long and hard about how to do such a thing the proper way.) Read More

Was choosing Sarah Palin a good decision or a bad decision?

This week, a completely unscientific and undoubtedly flawed investigation of whether Sarah Palin was a good or bad pick for VP.

(Disclaimer: This is just for fun. I'd have to think long and hard about how to do such a thing the proper way.) Read More

Catch a thief with pencil and ruler

It's time to play CSI, so put on your detective's hat. A series of burglaries has been committed, all by the same thief. You plot the crime locations on a map. Now you have to decide where to look for the bad guy. Many ideas come flooding to mind, but which one to go with? You only have limited time and effort to spend on this ... Read More

Put first things first with the help of software

gmail logo Ever find yourself frittering away the day responding to email after email? Ever think that if you'd just spent 8 hours working on that project, you'd be done and still have time to answer those emails in front of the TV later that night? Sure, we all have. Help is on the way.

Good decision makers often wind up with the best things available. But how do they do they do it? Finding the best thing involves searching, but it also involves knowing when to stop searching. How good a searcher are you? Do you search too much, or just the right amount? Play this little game and find out.

Major Choice Strategies

Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes, in their classic Rational Choice in an Uncertain World (pp. 232-234), outline some major choice strategies. Read More

Hillary and the snipers

Hillary Clinton

We've all seen the video: Hillary tells tales of landing under sniper fire. Some, for instance the trusted authorities who upload things to YouTube are calling it a lie. But is Hillary lying?Read More

A tale of two selves

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. On Sunday, future self might want to go to bed early on Thursday, wake up early on Friday, and hit the gym where it will listen to one hour of "Listen-and-repeat Italian" lessons while mastering the StairMaster. On Friday morning, this voice is nowhere to be heard. Read More