Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

A pretty good read! This book can be broadly cut into two parts. The first part explains in pretty layman terms the idea behind "libertarian paternalism", while the second part goes in depth about how this idea can be applied across a range of issues, from healthcare, saving the planet, to even marriages.

Will just touch on what the authors refer to as libertarian paternalism, and what an understanding of this issue will allow us to do about it. The line of logic goes something like this:

1. In a perfect world, all humans are rational and can make economic decisions accurately. In such a world, free market will ensure that humans optimise their choices and any increase in the complexity (or simply, number) of choices, is beneficial to humans.
2. However, in the real world, humans are really bad at making such rational economic choices, due to the following "interferences" - tending towards rules of thumb (anchoring, availability, representativeness, overconfidence in one's abilities, larger aversion to loss than gain, bias towards status quo, laziness, following the herd, or simply being overwhelmed by the complexity of the decision.
3. In such a situation, the Government can step in to influence humans at moments, when they are irrational or slightly weak, towards decisions that are beneficial to them without actually forcibly removing options from the table. e.g. giving citizens a large range of healthcare plans to choose from but gently influencing them to pick a better choice. This is known as "libertarian paternalism", which at times seems pretty oxymoronic, I must admit.
   
4. Such a framework that influences the behavior of the decision maker makes use of the very "interferences" that could potentially cause the human to make a wrong choice in the first place, but applies it for the good of the human. This framework is known as "choice architecture".

I think the ideas behind this book is extremely useful in policy-making, especially in areas where a mandatory option is politically unfeasible, and/or if there is clearly a "better" solution that the human should take. (The authors go through lengths to defend their point of view towards the end of the book, and I must say that they did quite a good job!) The applications towards sales and marketing is significant, as far as I can see.