I'm now at the age where my friends start getting married and last weekend I had the awesome privilege of being a Best Man. I must be very cool, because throughout the Best Man process behavioural economics kept on coming to mind.
Most couples now put up a wedding gift list online, which friends and family can use to guide their gift choices. I think this is a great innovation, allowing couples to easily communicate what would be useful as they embark upon married life together. As I perused these lists I got thinking about how to design them.
I'm going to make an assumption at this point: newlyweds would like their friends to be generous. So, how does one persuade one's friends to be generous?
One particular insight from behavioural economics called anchoring is likely to be useful (anchoring being the principle that people's opinions of what is a reasonable can be easily affected).
For example, say someone thinks £20 would be a reasonable wedding gift. How might one change that? I have two pieces of advice:
- Make the top item on the list uber-expensive. If the first gift people see is a £500 plasma screen, their opinion of what would be a reasonable gift may rise. Obviously not by £480, but some increase is not unlikely. No-one may actually buy the TV, but that's not the point, and hey it's no big disaster if they do!
- Create a way of communicating what previous people have given. For example, putting "bought" on an item that has been given already. Showing what others think is a reasonable gift is a surefire way of affecting what we think of as reasonable. Of course the risk is that if people give small gifts then this may decrease future gifts (if you were sneaky you could probably find a way of highlighting previous expensive gifts more).
Anyway, I would just like to say that when it comes to my wedding (which wont be anytime soon - all offers welcome...) I wont use either of the above methods. Why? Because manipulating my friends into giving me more is not something that I'm comfortable with. Thus I venture to suggest that the real lesson from this blog is that the use behavioural economics can throw up moral questions.
PS If I did see a friend trying to use behavioural economics to get me to give them more I would probably give them less out of principle!
PPS I hasten to add that the couple for which I was Best Man did not use any behavioural economics!
Recommended listening:
Give Me Everything by Pitbull
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