I Could Never Sell

One morning my daughter, then seven, called me to the front window. “Dad, the turkeys are back.” Yesterday she had been watching a young rabbit there. We live on a hill by a wood, and she watches deer, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs, opposum. Eyes on the sides of their heads. Prey. She knows the word. Where [...]

Week of April 22 “Online Dating is a fantastic hunting ground for irrational behavior,” says Dan Ariely, author of beststelling Predictably Irrational. “Unlocking Customer Behavior…,” he calls it. “How to Understand and Profit from the Predictably Irrational Customer.” You can begin this research with yourself, but you may be the last predictably irrational customer you [...]

Week of April 15 Here’s a Nokia researcher in a village in Ghana, a “user anthropologist” studying the have-nots in the world cell phone market: …the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at [...]

Week of April 8. In Slate the Undercover Economist asks Why Don’t Scarce Goods Cost More? I have previously pondered the very clever explanations economists produce to explain why prices do not rise to equalize supply and demand. Perhaps ticket prices are kept low to encourage a memorabilia-buying younger crowd. Perhaps popular restaurants like to [...]