One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.

One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether it’s about politics or sports - what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding.

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.