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Archive for 'Ideas'

Tipping on room service when delivery fee and service charge are included

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Tipping: Room service bills often includes a “delivery charge” of a few dollars plus a “service charge” of close to 20%. Should you tip more?

Soda, pop, and coke

Filed in Books ,Gossip ,Ideas ,Research News
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If you ask people in the US “What generic word do you use to describe carbonated soft drinks?”, you get data that look like these. Pop in the Midwest. Coke in the South. Soda everywhere else.

Good intentions don’t justify lying about risk

Filed in Books ,Ideas
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DO NOT LIE ABOUT RISK: PRESENT PROBABILITIES TRUTHFULLY OR NOT AT ALL On July 7th 2005, four bags containing bombs were left on London public transport. They exploded, killing 52 people. Bombs in two bags at the Boston Marathon this year killed three. We can imagine the policy-maker’s thinking when they came up with this […]

Dubai offers a gram of gold for every kilo of weight lost

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There seems to be a weight problem in Dubai and now the government has come up with a clever incentive: lose a kilogram of weight, get a gram of gold.

U. S. Behavioral Insights Team

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A behavioral insights team has been approved for the United States government, and, they’re hiring! The team is led by the impressive Maya U. Shankar, Senior Policy Advisor , who is a Ph.D. psychologist and Rhodes Scholar. This team is poised to do good things.

Numbers worth knowing: 142857

Filed in Encyclopedia ,Ideas
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ONE CRAZY NUMBER We at DSN thought it would be worth memorizing some reciprocals because we have a system for remembering numbers and because it might come in handy. So, we started writing out 1/x 1/2 = .5 1/3 = .3 1/4 = .25 1/5 = .2 1/6 = .16 1/7 = .142857 1/8 = […]

Which airline should you be loyal to?

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LOYALTY PROGRAM CHOICE BASED ON DEPARTURE COUNT If you read Decision Science News, you’re probably a professor or grad student or researcher or policy type who flies around a lot to conferences, symposia, workshops, tutorials, summer schools, and all-hands meetings. You travel the globe to give talks and work with co-authors. All this flying around […]

Subway riders’ quirks

Filed in Ideas ,Research News
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The New York Times reports on a report, written by the MTA, about the decisions of subway riders:

1.5 percent of doctors, a quarter of malpratice reports

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Some doctors receive more malpractice reports than others. Just how unequal is the distribution of malpractice reports?

3% of doctors receive half the complaints

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One topic in medical decision making that most people can relate to is the problem of choosing a doctor, especially when moving to a new town in which one knows few people from whom to receive references. One way to look at the problem is choosing a doctor you will likely not want to complain about. The likelihood of a doctor getting complaints is somewhat predictable, as shown in this recent article in BMJ Quality and Safety, based on a sample of almost 19,000 complaints filed by patients in Australia.