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.

Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms.

Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.

People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don't know how much money you'll need?