But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

With money we really fool ourselves. We are our biggest enemies with money and there are some things we can do about it. Automatic deductions are a wonderful thing. But ideally, you should wait until the end of the month, you can see how much extra money you had, and you should put that in your savings account. We don't do that too well, and if we did that, we would never save. So, what we do, is we take money out of our pocket into the saving account at the beginning of the month, take it outside of our control and as a consequence, we spend less and we save more.

If you get people to feel that they are putting something, that they are creating it and so on, their love for the project would increase. The more something is yours, the more you're willing to invest in it.

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

I don't think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It's a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down.

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.

In total, by giving people $30 bonus, Intel lost almost 5 percent of productivity. That's a lot. Now, think about it. You give money because you think this would increase motivation. It actually decreases motivation.