Book explores undiscovered economics of everyday life

People can behave in surprising ways. This is what two economists have shown with imaginative field experiments, tests they give of people outside the laboratory to determine how the respond in real world settings to incentives and then compare those results with the ways people respond when they don't have the same incentives.

They found that handicapped people are disadvantaged in the marketplace, people make choices about giving directions based on clothing style, that women's reluctance to compete for salaries fuels inequality, that people are willing to give more if they can opt-out of future giving and that the price of wine is itself a fluid thing.

The scholars--John List, the Homer J. Livingston Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Uri Gneezy, the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego--apply experimental tools to situations where they can test economic hypotheses related to human behavior.

The two are authors of the recently released book, The Why Axis; Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, published by PublicAffairs Books.

To us, economics is a discipline fully engaged with the entire spectrum of human emotions, with a laboratory as big as the whole world, List said.

Gneezy added that the book provides new understanding of the hidden motives that drive people to behave the way they do and of how we can achieve better outcomes for ourselves, our companies, our customers, and society in general.

The two economists have conducted experiments around the world that seek to draw out the causes for behavior to give more meaning to findings in fields where mere correlations are usually used to provide answers. Frequently people are misled by correlations, they found.

Retailers can be confused about the impact of advertising, they point out. One company, for example, believed that when it advertised, sales went up accordingly. A closer look by the scholars showed that the increased sales came during the holiday season and were not influenced primarily by advertising.

Teasing out the causes of why people react the way they do requires a little more work. In addition to testing an incentive to behave in a certain way, the economists also included people in the experiment who were not given the same incentive, a control group that provided a reference point to the impact of the intervention. Here are some examples of what they found: