Reading list

"The well-documented shortage of donated organs suggests that greater effort should be made to increase the number of individuals who decide to become potential donors. We examine the role of one factor: the no-action default for agreement. We first argue that such decisions are constructed in response to the question, and therefore influenced by the form of the question. We then describe research that shows that presumed consent increases agreement to be a donor, and compare countries with opt-in (explicit consent) and opt-out (presumed consent) defaults. Our analysis shows that opt-in countries have much higher rates of apparent agreement with donation, and a statistically significant higher rate of donations, even with appropriate statistical controls. We close by discussing the costs and benefits associated with both defaults as well as mandated choice.:

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 established the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. It is enforced by the FTC. It contains rules against dark patterns, e.g. a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism must be present in all marketing emails.

"The article discusses how should policy-makers choose defaults regarding organ donors. First, consider that every policy must have a no-action default, and defaults impose physical, cognitive, and, in the case of donation, emotional costs on those who must change their status. Second, note that defaults can lead to two kinds of misclassification, willing donors who are not identified or people who become donors against their wishes. Changes in defaults could increase donations in the United States of additional thousands of donors a year. Because each donor can be used for about three transplants, the consequences are substantial in lives saved."

"Differences in opt-in and opt-out responses are an important element of the current public debate concerning on-line privacy and more generally for permission marketing. We explored the issue empirically. Using two on-line experiments we show that the default has a major role in determining revealed preferences for further contact with a Web site. We then explore the origins of these differences showing that both framing and defaults have separate and additive effects in affecting the construction of preferences."

The authors contend that there are no unambiguous instances of the sunk cost (aka concorde) fallacy in lower animals. They also find that young children, when placed in an equivalent economic situation, exhibit more normatively correct behaviour than do adults.

In appendix A of the classic paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Brin and Page argue against advertising as a business model for their search engine (which later became Google).

"People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences."

"Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability."

"This report provides a first look at the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and administered by Educational Testing Service, in collaboration with Westat, Inc. It provides the most detailed portrait that has ever been available on the condition of literacy in this nation -- and on the unrealized potential of its citizens."

We analyze a sequential decision model in which each decision maker looks at the decisions made by previous decision makers in taking her own decision. [...] We then show that the decision rules that are chosen by optimizing individuals will be characterized by herd behavior.

In this paper, Herb Simon introduces the idea that "the knowledge and the computational power of the decision maker are severely limited" and "we must distinguish between the real world and the actor’s perception of it and reasoning about it."

Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist who helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory. This is his PhD thesis. In chapter 3, he reports the famous autokinetic movement experiments.

"Framing" occurs when people make choices based on whether the options are presented as positive (a gain) or negative (a loss) connotations. This classic research paper provides evidence.

"This paper presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develops an alternative model, called prospect theory. Choices among risky prospects exhibit several pervasive effects that are inconsistent with the basic tenets of utility theory."

A heuristic is a rule of thumb or "cognitive shortcut" that humans use to make decisions. Heuristics are prone to biases, i.e. mistakes that we are all prone to making. This classic paper from 1974 explains three heuristics and associated biases.