【Management 0326】如何作决定？让这位行为经济学家来教你

刘颖

Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely has dedicated much of his career to understanding how—and why—we make decisions. It’s a question that’s led him down some interesting roads academically: He’s authored dozens of studies on examining everything from familiarity can “breed contempt”, why we attach more value to something when we give it up versus when we acquire it, and the effects of self-serving altruism.
More recently, it’s catapulted him into the public sphere.

Over the past decade, Ariely has mastered the art of making intimidating academic results more accessible. Through his books and TED talks, he turns his complex, often ambiguous research into digestible, evidence-backed takeaways on topics such as why we tend to justify our own bad behavior, or how conflicts of interest affect our personal goals. By popularizing the science driving our decision-making, he wants to help us make better ones.

He’s also taking a more direct approach—one that comes with a financial incentive. Today, Ariely is involved with a handful of startups that help us make better (or less stupid) decisions on important stuff, including money, health, and insurance.

Ariely joined Qapital, a digital financial planning startup aimed at millennials, as a “chief behavioral economist” in 2015. Drawing on his research, he worked with the company to design features such as ‘the guilty pleasure rule,’ which automatically saves a small amount each time a user orders a latte from Starbucks, say, or goes online shopping, and ‘the roundup rule,’ which does exactly what it says it will, converting odd pennies into savings. The overarching goal is to make saving money as frictionless as spending it.

He’s also an advisor to Lemonade, a New York-based insurance startup that just raised $34 million in Series B funding. When he first met with founders Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger in 2014, he was impressed by their technology but ambivalent about joining in an official capacity. That changed when he heard their goal: to create an insurance system that fostered trust, not suspicion, among its users.

As a behavioral economist, it was an intriguing problem to try and solve. “That’s when I became very excited,” he says. “As someone who has been studying conflicts of interest and dishonesty for 15 years, and I see how corrosive it can be.”

Under the traditional model, insurer’s and users’ incentives are fundamentally misaligned. Every successfully paid claim costs the insurance company money, hence the difficulty in getting them accepted in the first place (which, in turn, encourages fraudulent behavior in users, who often assume they’re getting screwed regardless). To correct for this, Lemonade takes 20% of premiums as a flat fee; when a policy ends, all unclaimed funds are donated to a nonprofit or charity, a rather elegant solution that removes the financial conflict of interest.

In addition to his role at Lemonade and Qapital (he has an equity stake in both companies), Ariely is the co-founder of Genie, a kitchen appliance that “cooks” nutritious cartridge meals (options include couscous and vegetables, chicken with rice, and miso ramen) in less than two minutes, and Shapa, a smart scale that displays shifts in weight on a five-point scale in lieu of pounds.

Both attempt to remove every-day obstacles—cooking and the counterproductive “loss aversion” we feel when we get on a scale and to find the number has inched up—that often stops us from making healthy decisions. This desire, to shape behavior via a series of gentle nudges, informs all of Ariely’s entrepreneurial work: “It’s about trying to take the research we know about what kind of mistakes people make, and figuring out how can we get people to make better decisions.”

Technology makes his job easier. “One of the principles from behavioral economics is that the environment matters,” he says. In a pre-digital world, this was hard to achieve at scale. But thanks to our smartphones, which, for many of us, are basically appendages at this point, “we can be part of your environment.” The more time we spend on our phones, the more seamlessly people like Ariely, through our various apps, trackers, and reminders, can control our behavior.

Of course, the reverse is also true. The more time we spend glued to our phones, the easier it is for people with the opposite goal—to distract us, to encourage spending, to keep us from going to the gym via online wormholes—to manipulate our actions.

刘颖

TRANSLATIONS


杜克大学行为经济学教授丹·阿雷利一直努力研究人们做决策的过程和原因，多年研究下来在学术上有不少有趣的发现。他发表了几十篇论文，研究领域非常广泛，例如发现关系亲密容易“导致鄙视”；放弃后人们才会更珍视某样东西，拥有时却不觉得；研究自私型利他主义等。最近，他突然进入公众视野。

十年来，阿雷利逐渐学会将艰深的学术成果转化为易于公众理解的内容。通过写书和在非营利机构TED组织的大会上演讲，他将复杂且晦涩的研究结果简化为容易理解证据充分的要点，解释一些生活中常见的问题，比如为何我们爱给自己的错误行动找理由，利益冲突如何影响实现个人目标。他希望通过科普决策的过程，帮助大家做决定时更理性也明智。

阿雷利还采取了更直接的方式——涉及财务的手段。现在他加入了一些初创公司，创业项目都是帮助人们在财富、健康和保险等重要方面做出更好的选择（起码少做些错误决策）。

2015年，阿雷利加盟面向80、90后的数字理财创业公司Qapital，担任“首席行为经济学家”。他根据研究成果与合作推出一些特色功能，例如利用“愧疚的快乐”功能，用户在星巴克买一杯拿铁咖啡或者网购一次就自动存下一小笔钱。另一款“零钱随手存”则顾名思义，会将所有零钱都转为储蓄。产品设计的总体目标是让存钱和消费一样轻松方便。

阿雷利还在纽约一家初创公司Lemonade担任顾问。该公司刚完成规模3400万美元的B轮融资。2014年第一次见到Lemonade的创始人丹尼尔·薛伯和塞伊·威灵格，阿雷利就觉得他们的技术非常先进，但对于是否加入公司比较犹疑。后来他听到两位创始者讲述创业目标：打造让客户信任不猜疑的保险系统，阿雷利才决定加入。

作为行为经济学家，阿雷利觉得打造理想的保险系统非常有意思，很想努力解决。他说：“遇到这种挑战我很激动。我研究利益冲突和欺诈15年，了解危害有多大。”

传统保险模式下，保险公司和顾客的动机并不一致。每宗成功的理赔都要消耗保险公司的资金，因此想让保险公司接受理赔有点困难（这也变相鼓动了客户采取欺诈手段，因为客户总觉得被保险公司骗了）。为了扭转现状，Lemonade统一收取20%的保费，保单到期后，所有未领取的保险金都会捐赠给非营利机构或者慈善组织，这样就消除了钱财方面的利益冲突，比传统模式容易让人接受。

除了在Lemonade和Qapital任职（他持有两家公司的股权），阿雷利还联合创立了两家公司Genie和Shapa。Genie研发的厨房家电不到两分钟就能 “烹饪”有营养的盒饭（可选套餐包括库斯库斯粉配蔬菜、鸡肉饭、味噌拉面等）。Shapa推出一款智能体重秤，按满分五分给身体打分显示健康状况，代替了传统的按磅计算体重。

阿雷利的这两个创业项目都满足了日常生活需求。厨房工具解决了烹饪难题。智能秤则解决了发现体重增加时“厌恶减重失败”的心理，心情变差往往会妨碍努力维持健康的决心。通过一系列温和的改动调整行为是阿雷利创业的终极目标：“先研究人们常犯哪些错误，再想办法帮人们改善。”

科技也让阿雷利的工作更轻松了。他指出：“行为经济学有一条原则是，环境很重要。”没有数字技术的年代难以大规模应用。现在人人基本上都有智能手机，“我们可以变成环境的一部分。”在手机上花的时间越多，阿雷利等人就可以越方便地通过各种应用，各种追踪器和提醒技术方便地管理个人行为。

当然，数字时代也有负面影响。我们越黏着手机，就越容易适得其反受其所控——注意力分散，花钱无节制，还容易因为沉迷上网忽略身体健康。