[Interview] Richard Thaler

A month ago, I read some books about behavior economics include "Nudge - Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein" that becomes hot book now because the President of S.Korea Lee, Myung Bak recommended it to staffs of the Blue House.

Here is my review of the book. When I bloged it, I had a question

'When Nudge works effectively and efficiently?'

When the choice architect like government design nice nudge in order to make people move on their way, it should take cost. So, there is trade off between cost of designing nudge and value from designed nudge. That's reason why we cannot use nudge everytime.

As backing to the question, we need to know when Nudge is really necessary. I found the answer of the question from the interview with Richard Thaler.
He said it depends on the complexity of the problem. For example, here is a simple problem like which apple has better taste. We can easily find the way to get solution. However, here is a much difficult problem like which medical surgery is better for me? Unless we have some knowledge in the medical area, it's really hard problem. Like this medical problem, there are some complex problems that is happened barely sometime and have no enough feedback to make learning effect. At solving this kind of problems, we need nudge.

Here is the full text of interview from the Chosun Ilbo.