The fallacy of sunk costs occyrs when people take past expenditure into account when they make a decision, even though it cannot affect their future and cannot be changed. It is often regarded as a canonical example of a cognitive bias in humans because almost everybody does it. Of course, if it’s so suboptimal to […]
I know you’ve all thought it at some time of your life, but Chris Dillow thinks it really is true: It could be that the reason why so many “top jobs” are done badly is not that second-raters do them, in which case the problem would be solved by hiring the right people. Instead, it […]
Wellington City Council is considering lifting parking fees again because it thinks people are holding on to the spaces too long. The local paper disapproves, as does David Farrar. Now, I’m no expert on the local politics and they may be quite right that this is just a revenue raising measure, despite the council’s position […]
Apparently, saying your products aren’t tested on animals doesn’t mean what you might think it means: …for example a company may say ‘Finished product not tested on animals’ or ‘not tested on animals’, which means the ingredients could well be! … Avon says: “Avon does not test products or ingredients on animals, nor do we […]
Contrast this new government policy: Poor migrants who speak little or no English are to be subject to stricter immigration laws… Immigration categories are to be changed in an effort to “reduce the number of unskilled migrants who find it difficult to get jobs and are more likely to get benefit payments”. to this academic […]
The Economist thinks that the prevalence of small firms in Greece is a problem. A bias to small firms is costly. The productivity of European firms with fewer than 20 workers is on average little more than half that of firms with 250 or more workers (see right-hand chart). …If the best small firms were […]