Behavioral Economics with Fexingo: Decision Making, Bias, and How People Really Spend

What really drives the way people spend, save, and invest? Behavioral economics challenges the textbook assumption of the rational actor by revealing the systematic biases and mental shortcuts that shape every financial decision. In this show, Lucas and Luna sit down at the research library to dissect the experimental evidence, from Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory to Thaler's nudge framework, and test those findings against real-world pricing, marketing, and policy design. They walk through specific studies — the endowment effect in housing markets, the sunk-cost fallacy in subscription pricing, the framing of credit-card interest rates — and ask what those experiments imply for a consumer choosing a mortgage or a CFO setting a price. Lucas brings the investigative journalist's rigor, pressing for the exact sample sizes, replication rates, and alternative interpretations; Luna pushes back with the practitioner's instinct, asking whether a bias that shows up in a lab actually translates to a shopping cart on Amazon. The listener is not a beginner: you already know that people aren't perfectly rational. What you want is the nuance — the boundary conditions where biases flip, the studies that fail to replicate, and the ethical line between a nudge and a manipulation. Each episode leaves one open question hanging: if we know these biases exist, should the government regulate against them, or is that a cure worse than the disease?

Language

English

Type

podcast