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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. nudges exist almost everywhere, and how to nudge can be learnt;
2. building a choice architecture is an important process;
3. looking at things from an economic angle can explain many seemly unanswerable questions.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

• building a choice architecture is an important process

✍️ Top Quotes From the Book

• A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
• In economics (and in ordinary life), a basic principle is that you can never be made worse off by having more options, because you can always turn them down.
• Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time.
• Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges.
• Roughly speaking, they hate losses about twice as much as they like gains.
• More generally, a study by Henrik Cronqvist (2007) shows that the ads resembled the nightmare more than the happy dream.
• The more choices there are, and the more complex the situation, the more important it is to have enlightened choice architecture.
• Polluters are explicitly permitted to trade their allowances. Because pollution reduction can be turned into cash, strong incentives are created for environmentally beneficial behavior.
• Marriage might be seen, in part, as a solution to a self-control problem, in which people take steps to increase the likelihood that their relationship will endure.
• It’s worth repeating the key finding: nearly 100 percent of people believe that they are certain or almost certain not to get divorced!
• Typically, a woman’s economic prospects fall after divorce, whereas the prospects of the man increase.