Put a number on choice and it becomes a target; put a target on it and the number stops meaning what it meant. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected. Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception. Economists have spent decades modelling choice as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system.
Three kinds of mistake
None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. In the studies we have, the effect is modest, reliable and almost entirely ignored by the people it describes. The strange thing about the loyalty card is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected.
