经济学人:合理的怀疑:只见部分,不辩总体(2)

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　　(ie, they must decide to opt¹ out rather than opt in) dramatically increases the share of employees saving through such programmes, for example. （即，他必须选择退出而不是加入）极大地提高了通过此类计划进行储蓄的员工的比例。

　　Mr Thaler, with Mr Kahneman and Jack² Knetsch, also worked to understand the role of fairness in judging economic outcomes. 赛勒还与卡尼曼和杰克·克内齐对理解公平在判定经济结果中的作用进行了研究。

　　They conducted experiments in which a student chosen at ran dom was asked to divide $20 between himself and another subject. 他们进行了一系列随机挑选的一位学生被要求在他自己与另一个对象之间平分20美元的实验。

　　Only rarely would the student keep most of the money, as pure rationality suggests he should. 只有在极少数的情况下，这位学生才会像纯理性所说的那样，留下大部分钱。

　　Similarly, the authors used surveys to show that people find practices like price gouging³ in the wake of disasters unfair. 同样地，作者使用了各种调查来说明，人们认为灾难后哄抬价格这类行为是不公平的。

　　In some multi-round experiments players chose to punish participants who acted selfishly in early rounds, even if that meant accepting a lower payout themselves. 在一些多轮次的实验中，参与者选择去惩罚在前面轮次中表现自私的同伴，纵然这意味着他们自己要更低的。

　　These insights—that people care about fairness, find self-control hard and hate losing what they already have—may seem trivial outside the strange world of economics. 在陌生的经济学世界之外，这些深刻见解——人们关注公平、发现很难自律、讨厌失去已经拥有的东西——可能看起来微不足道。

　　In fact, the greatest contribution of behavioural economics may have been to nudge the field away from attempts to extrapolate grand theories from basic rules of individual behaviour. 实际上，行为经济学的最大贡献可能就是推动这一学科脱离从个人行为的基本规律中推导出宏大理论的尝试。

　　Today ambitious economists⁴ are quite likely to immerse themselves in empirical work focused on specific policy questions. 如今，有抱负的经济学家很有可能埋首于聚焦各种特殊政策问题的实证性研究之中。

　　That is a legacy⁵ worth treasuring, however you do the mental accounting⁶. 这是一项值得珍惜的遗产，不管你如何进行心理盘算。

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