Dan Ariely - The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION . Copyright 2009 by Dan Ariely. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

F IRST H ARPER P ERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 9780061353246 (pbk.)

EPub Edition 2010 ISBN 9780061958724

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THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY. Copyright 2010 by Dan Ariely. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

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ISBN 978-0-06-199503-3 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-200487-1 (International Edition)

EPub Edition 2010 ISBN: 9780062008565

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THE (HONEST) TRUTH ABOUT DISHONESTY. Copyright 2012 by Dan Ariely. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Lyrics by David Pogue appear courtesy of the songwriter. Copyright David Pogue.

FIRST EDITION

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ISBN: 978-0-06-218359-0 (Hardcover)

Epub Edition JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062183620

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T HE IRRATIONAL BUNDLE Copyright 2013 by Dan Ariely. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition March 2013 ISBN 9780062288745

INTRODUCTION
How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality and to the
Research Described Here

CHAPTER 1 - The Truth about Relativity
Why Everything Is RelativeEven When It Shouldnt Be

CHAPTER 2 - The Fallacy of Supply and Demand
Why the Price of Pearlsand Everything ElseIs Up in the Air

CHAPTER 3 - The Cost of Zero Cost
Why We Often Pay Too Much When We Pay Nothing

CHAPTER 4 - The Cost of Social Norms
Why We Are Happy to Do Things, but Not WhenWe Are Paid to Do Them

CHAPTER 6 - The Influence of Arousal
Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize

CHAPTER 7 - The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control
Why We Cant Make Ourselves Do What We Want to Do

CHAPTER 8 - The High Price of Ownership
Why We Overvalue What We Have

CHAPTER 9 - Keeping Doors Open
Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective

CHAPTER 10 - The Effect of Expectations
Why the Mind Gets What It Expects

CHAPTER 11 - The Power of Price
Why a 50-Cent Aspirin Can Do What a Penny Aspirin Cant

CHAPTER 13 - The Context of Our Character, Part I
Why We Are Dishonest, and What We Can Do about It

CHAPTER 14 - The Context of Our Character, Part II
Why Dealing with Cash Makes Us More Honest

CHAPTER 15 - Beer and Free Lunches
What Is Behavioral Economics, and Where Are the Free Lunches?

How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality and
to the Research Described Here

I have been told by many people that I have an unusual way of looking at the world. Over the last 20 years or so of my research career, its enabled me to have a lot of fun figuring out what really influences our decisions in daily life (as opposed to what we think, often with great confidence, influences them).

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we dont really need?

Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a one-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?

Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who havent? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?

By the end of this book, youll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. Understanding the answer to the question about aspirin, for example, has implications not only for your choice of drugs, but for one of the biggest issues facing our society: the cost and effectiveness of health insurance. Understanding the impact of the Ten Commandments in curbing dishonesty might help prevent the next Enron-like fraud. And understanding the dynamics of impulsive eating has implications for every other impulsive decision in our livesincluding why its so hard to save money for a rainy day.

My goal, by the end of this book, is to help you fundamentally rethink what makes you and the people around you tick. I hope to lead you there by presenting a wide range of scientific experiments, findings, and anecdotes that are in many cases quite amusing. Once you see how systematic certain mistakes arehow we repeat them again and againI think you will begin to learn how to avoid some of them.

But before I tell you about my curious, practical, entertaining (and in some cases even delicious) research on eating, shopping, love, money, procrastination, beer, honesty, and other areas of life, I feel it is important that I tell you about the origins of my somewhat unorthodox worldviewand therefore of this book. Tragically, my introduction to this arena started with an accident many years ago that was anything but amusing.

ON WHAT WOULD otherwise have been a normal Friday afternoon in the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli, everything changed irreversibly in a matter of a few seconds. An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns.