Nudge Wiki

Person

Uri Gneezy

Behavioral economist, University of California San Diego

Behavioral economist holding the Atkinson Endowed Chair of Behavioral Economics at UC San Diego, and author of The Why Axis and Mixed Signals. His research areas are costly signaling and incentive design.

Episode 151 covers costly signaling: the idea that the significance we attach to a signal scales with how expensive it was to send. Explains why an accountant with an otherwise "cool" biker image will never get a neck tattoo (see Uri's Tattooed Accountant Costly-Signal Case), why Toyota's oddly-shaped Prius beat Honda's near-identical hybrid Civic despite an inferior underlying car (see Toyota Prius vs Honda Hybrid Costly-Signal Case), and the distinction between social signaling (what you show others) and self-signaling (what your own actions tell you about yourself) — including why paying blood donors can reduce donations, and why a Vienna restaurant's pay-what-you-want diners paid more, not less, when their payment was made completely anonymous (see Costly Signaling).

Episode 155 covers incentive design and how incentives frequently backfire by changing what people are motivated to do, rather than simply how much effort they apply — 19th-century Chinese fossil hunters who were paid per fragment learned to smash whole fossils into more fragments, and Vietnamese rat-catchers paid per tail learned to farm rats rather than kill them (see Perverse Incentives (Gaming and Meaning-Change)). Also covers his own famous field study finding that a small late-pickup fine at an Israeli daycare center doubled late pickups rather than reducing them, because the fine reframed lateness from a moral failing into a fairly-priced service (see Gneezy Rustichini Daycare Fine Study).

Returns a third time for Episode 175, covering the Framing Effect applied to incentives and pricing: reframing a surcharge as a discount (see Coca-Cola Vending-Machine Surcharge Framing Case, Netherlands Credit-Card-Surcharge Framing Study, AMC Theatre Premium-Seat Framing Case); a tangible gas-card promotion outperforming a larger cash discount (see Gneezy Gas-Card vs Cash-Discount Car Study); a Singapore taxi-driver walking incentive tied to a genuinely painful expense (see Singapore Taxi-Driver Walking Incentive Study); loss-framed bonuses outperforming gain-framed ones for teachers and factory workers (see Loss-Framed Teacher Bonus Study, Chinese Factory Loss-Framed Bonus Study); pro-social framing for small incentives (see Alex Seamus Effort-Charity Incentive Study, Pret a Manger Colleague-Gift Bonus Case); Wikipedia's non-cash recognition awards (see Wikipedia Awards Retention Study); Peloton's price-doubling case (see Peloton Price-Doubling Veblen Case); and Amazon's pay-to-quit self-selection scheme (see Amazon Pay-to-Quit Self-Selection Case).

Discussed in

  • Episode 151 — 151-why-your-accountant-won-t-get-a-tattoo
  • Episode 155 — 155-how-incentives-work-and-why-most-backfire
  • Episode 162 — 162-the-best-of-nudge-in-2023 (year-end recap, daycare fine study)
  • Episode 175 — 175-why-amazon-paid-staff-5k-to-quit
  • Episode 180 — 180-10-pricing-tips-from-10-pricing-experts (re-cited, gas-card study)

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