If you like that kind of stuff, you might also look at Sway, by Ori and Rom Brafman, and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The last was far and away the best, in my opinion. But even there, you won't learn anything new -- you'll just get the old truths retold in a different (and more striking) way.Norbert Schlenker wrote: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
But then most of the finance literature for non-academics seems to be mere repetition of old truths.
As for "free", that was probably Arieli's best insight. But even there, I wonder. For example, big cities in Canada now offer a free twelve or sixteen page tabloid along with daily newspapers that cost upwards of a dollar. Yet I see lots of people passing up the free paper only to buy one of the more expensive ones. (I'm too lazy to look up the circulations, but I bet that the paid papers beat the free ones.)
My most striking experience with "free" was while I was on vacation in Delaware in August 1984. Our daily paper there was the Washington Post, and it reported on the experience of a new start-up airline, flying between Washington and Norfolk. For its first week, the new airline was offering free trips. The first day, they filled barely 20% of their seats, despite a publicity blitz. Meanwhile, at the next gate, US Air (as I recall) was 80% full with passengers paying $59 for a trip. Both were flying at about the same time, and would arrive at about the same time. What was going on?
George