Exploiting High Time Preferences
Written by Dixie Flatline
Exploiting high time preferences provides a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities during a boom when people will literally pay for anything advertised on TV, but if you blend exploiting high time preferences, with the promise to help resist high time preferences, then that is just pure sick and evil genius.
From Freakonomics,
As readers of this blog know, stickK (shameless plug) is a commitment store that helps you stick to your goals. We’ll elicit support from your friends. We’ll nag you if you want. And most uniquely, we’ll let you put your own money at stake. It’s still hard for me to believe that in just over a year, people have been willing to put at risk more than $1 million in their contractual commitments.
Yeah, people have been willing to risk their money to do what they already consider to be the right thing. Is this an efficient use of capital?
It gets better,
Economists tend to think of information and incentives as the core drivers of human behavior. But Cialdini and Positive Energy have me thinking that smiley faces may also play a useful role.
What would this scam be without an appeal to anti-intellectualism? It’s based around collectivist confirmation rather than individualistic self-discipline. Basically, you can’t succeed on your own. Success is being as similar to your peers as possible.
As an aside, I’ve recently had to confront how I do business, and decide whether to pursue a lucrative but exploitative path, or a less lucrative and less exploitative path. I chose not to take advantage of people with high time preferences. For now.