(Here ya go, Oak!)

Am in the middle of reading "Predictably irrational" by Dan Ariely, and I just love it. He comments on and tries to explain many of the strange reactions I've wondered about, in myself and other people - basically how people often do not choose rationally in certain situations where you'd expect them to, but instead choose not only irrationally but predictably so.

For example he explains how we like to make choices by comparison, because we have difficulty assessing value without something to compare with. Given a choice between 2 options A and B that are hard to compare, we try to compare but just have to make a choice in the end. Given a third option C, which is an obviously inferior version of B, we will tend to choose B over A, reasoning (maybe) "well, I don't know much about A, but I do know that B is better than C, so B can't be a bad choice."

He actually uses a real subscription ad for the Economist to show this: he was wondering why they had both a internet-only option for 60$ (A), an internet-and-print option for 120 $ (B) and a print-only option for 120 $ (C), the same price as B. Why would anyone choose C, when you get more for the same price by choosing B? The answer is that nobody did choose C, but the existence of the option and the comparison caused more people to choose B, which was the most expensive option.

Lots of studies and experiments like this carried out on his long-suffering students at MIT - light reading and a lot of fun.