Sendhil Mullainathan

One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn't do is really focus on the…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Eat better or work out more, and youll see the benefits weeks, months or years down the road. Sleep more, and youll…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, 'This…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Organizations talk about spending their lives firefighting - dealing with the next problem without having the bandwidth to deal with what is…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.

— Sendhil Mullainathan

People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don't know. We don't know the prices of things. But…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

You can get pictures into what people are sort of thinking about others. Just go onto Google and type 'Why are Indians'…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Policymakers think that if they get the abstractions right, that will drive behavior in the desired direction. But the world happens in…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task - say, solving math problems - men are more…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Our outrage at inequality is primal. But primal emotions are not always noble ones. Of course, when I see a colleague receive…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It's a quest that will require…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

It's 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

If you send out one coupon with a deadline of a week and another that must be used within the next month,…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Time can be dissected easily: an hour can be cut up in many ways. Fifteen minutes on this memo, a five-minute walk…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to…

— Sendhil Mullainathan

If you go and stop people at a supermarket and ask them for their receipt and say, 'Hey how much did you…

— Sendhil Mullainathan