behavioral-economics

Search remains a primary way for publishers to reach audiences. But a growing share of searches now end without a click. Users increasingly find answers directly on results pages or... The post AI search is transforming discovery and media economics appeared first on Digital Content Next .

Somewhere in the gap between a person deciding where to live and a nation’s wealth clustering in a handful of cities, something gets lost. Economists model the aggregate; sociologists study the individual; neither, quite, manages to speak the other’s language. The equations that govern a gas of molecules, however, turn out to say something rather precise about how both come to be, and a new paper…

The email arrived on a Tuesday morning: "Your cloud bill for last month: $2.4 million." The CFO's response was immediate: "That's 3x our budget. What the hell are we running?" The answer? Nothing special. Just a standard data analytics workload that happened to cross availability zones. A lot. Turns out, 80% of that bill—nearly $2 million—was data egress fees. Not compute. Not storage. Just the p…

Consumers prefer periodic corporate donations over one‑time gifts, research finds. Even when totals are equal, consistent giving signals authentic motivation and leads to more favorable views of the company.

Published on May 4, 2026 1:02 PM GMT Hey everyone, I have a question for you that could inform an EA related research question: What do you believe to be the most important reasons to support multiple different interventions? If you donate to a single fund that itself supports multiple interventions, what reasoning should apply to the fund's allocation decisions? This question is relevant as I am…

The economics of AI don’t always match expectations. High compute, infrastructure, and reliability costs mean human labor remains the more cost-effective option across many real-world tasks. The post Why Humans Are Still More Cost-Effective Than AI Compute appeared first on TechNewsWorld .

How to Avoid Losses in a Bear Market: A Crypto Trader's Survival Guide Here's a number most traders don't want to hear: over the last 51 days of continuous market monitoring, 93% of the time the crypto market was classified as bearish. Not choppy. Not neutral. Bearish. That data comes from 10,000+ market snapshots taken every five minutes by the Regime API , scoring 10 weighted signals across fun…

Hourly workers across a number of industries have long been grappling with unstable schedules and pay as their employers use software to slash labor costs and maximize productivity.

Exclusive: Union body finds workers describing themselves as ‘gambling’ because wages felt like the outcome of chance rather than work The practice of using “dynamic pricing” to set pay on gig economy platforms including Uber should be banned because it leaves workers at the mercy of shadowy algorithms with no certainty over their earnings, trade union leaders have urged. In a report exposing the…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 02 May 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07454-y Life numerological practice and household financial asset investment: evidence from China

Contemporary economic theory relies on a set of concepts—labour, value, production, exchange—that are treated as explanatory primitives. Despite their centrality, these notions are applied to increasingly heterogeneous forms of activity without preserving a consistent criterion of distinction. Activities requiring substantial effort are routinely classified alongside those directly involved in ma…

Apps, AI tools and shaky job prospects are pushing gen Z into markets earlier, blending caution with risk-taking Ambrico Ranginui first heard of cryptocurrencies when he was 12 years old. By the time he was 16, he had saved enough from birthday gifts and his allowance to invest. “Growing up in a single mum household, it made me quite a determined person to get ahead,” Ranginui said. “I wanted to …

The once inexorable rise in retiree living standards since the second world war has broken down. Can we keep the dream alive for future generations? When you think of retirement, what comes to mind? Perhaps it is images of older people enjoying a well-deserved period of leisure and comfort in the final stretch of their lives. Cruise ships, garden centres, golf clubs and bungalows by the sea. The …

This is the third paper in The Conditions of the Invisible Hand, a critical examination of contemporary economic configurations and the libertarian tradition's defence of them. Paper I (Free Markets Without Markets) established that the formal conditions extracted from the libertarian tradition's canonical sources do not obtain in the documented record of the contemporary Western economy. Paper I…

In our companion post, we used a new module of our Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) to shed light on how recent retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households. This fact is consistent with the popular press’s idea of a “ K-shaped economy ” in which higher-income households experience faster growth in spending than lower-income households. In this post, we dive deeper int…

Aggregate real consumer spending has risen solidly since 2023. However, it is less clear how widely shared this improvement has been across all segments of society. This is important because systematic heterogeneity may mask the dependence of aggregate growth on a relatively small group of households and thus conceal macroeconomic risks. In this post, we use consumer spending data recently added …

I think a lot of companies are still telling themselves a very comforting story about AI costs. The story goes like this: Tokens are cheap. Models keep getting better. A few copilots here, a few agents there, maybe a chatbot for support, maybe some code generation in CI, and somehow this all stays in the “software subscription” bucket. I do not buy that story anymore. My take is simple: tokens ar…

Recent research reveals that almost 80 percent of younger adults now focus on short-term financial needs instead of long-term goals.

Most market research is a lie. People say they’ll buy a product in a survey, but then they abandon their cart in real life. Yesterday, I launched Sediman to bridge that gap. Instead of asking humans what they think, I built a behavioral engine that spawns AI Agents with rich, census-weighted personas—diverse incomes, ages, and psychological biases—and lets them "live" through a market simulation.…