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Savings Lottery

Peter Tufano at HBS has been doing research on savings based lotteries for a while.  The basic idea is that lots (generally poorer) people buy lottery tickets – the average American household spends $500 per year on lottery tickets – and it is a well known fact that we don’t…

More pleasure, better business

Financial services are a drag.  Paying bills sucks. Sorting through the best products is no fun, given how many there are and their considerable complexity.  A mortgage?  Forget it.  Why is it that people can’t figure out how to make financial services interactions more fun?  Doing so needn’t be a…

Marshmellow for your payments?

Ideas like paternalistic libertarianism are en vogue these days.  You’ve read about them in books like Nudge, Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational.  It’s all part of the attack of the behavioral economists, a band of economists who believe that traditional economic modeling is based on humans that are fundamentally not human,…