Behavioral Economics with Fexingo: Decision Making, Bias, and How People Really Spend

In Episode 105 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore why paying rent feels different from other bills. Drawing on a 2024 study by Harvard and USC economists, they discuss the 'moral accounting' effect: people view rent as a fair exchange with a landlord, while mortgage payments feel like building personal wealth. The episode examines how this bias affects housing policy, ren...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore why subscription services exploit our tendency to treat monthly fees as sunk costs, leading us to overuse or keep services we no longer need. They dissect the psychological mechanism called 'subscription debt' — the feeling that you've already paid, so you must 'get your money's worth.' Using examples from streaming platf...

Episode 103 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo dives into the psychological trap of loyalty programs. Lucas and Luna explore how your brain treats a punch card or rewards app not as a discount incentive, but as a justification to pay full price — and often more. The episode centers on a 2018 study from the University of Chicago showing that customers at a coffee chain spent 12% more per visit af...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the psychology behind price-match guarantees. Why do these policies feel like a win even when you never use them? The hosts unpack a 2023 study by researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford that found price-match guarantees increase purchase intent by 22 percent, even when the guarantee is nearly impossible to...

Episode 101 digs into the 'discount-as-reward' effect — why your brain fires dopamine when you see a sale tag, even if you weren't planning to buy. Hosts Lucas and Luna explore the 2024 Stanford study that found shoppers' brains treat a 20 percent discount on a product they already wanted the same way they treat a $5 cash windfall. They discuss why retailers like REI have experimented with member-...

In this milestone 100th episode, Lucas and Luna explore the behavioral economics of free trials — specifically, why they often feel like a debt rather than a gift. Drawing on a 2023 study from the Journal of Consumer Research, they unpack the 'felt obligation' effect: the subtle guilt that drives us to convert even when the product disappoints. They contrast Spotify's free tier with a lesser-known...

In episode 99 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how your brain processes spending as a social signal—not just a transaction. They dive into the concept of conspicuous consumption, from Thorstein Veblen's 1899 'Theory of the Leisure Class' to modern examples like luxury watches and branded goods. Lucas explains the Veblen effect, where higher prices can increase demand fo...

Episode 98 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores why we keep paying for subscriptions we barely use. Lucas and Luna dissect the psychology of the sunk cost fallacy in recurring payments, using the case of a typical $15 monthly gym membership that goes unused. They discuss how mental accounting separates subscription costs from other spending, the pain of canceling, and practical ways to ov...

Episode 97 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores mental accounting — the cognitive shortcut that makes us treat $50 found on the street differently from $50 earned. Lucas and Luna break down Richard Thaler's classic framework, using the example of a $20 theater ticket lost versus $20 cash lost, to show how we compartmentalize money into mental buckets. They discuss how this leads to irrati...

Episode 96 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo dives into the sunk cost fallacy as it applies to subscriptions. Lucas and Luna explore why we keep paying for gym memberships, streaming services, and software we barely use, anchored by a 2025 study from the University of Chicago showing that consumers waste an average of $237 per year on unused subscriptions. They discuss the psychology of monthly...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the 'endowment effect' and why physically touching a product makes you willing to pay more for it. They break down a 2008 study from the University of Chicago where students who held a coffee mug for just 30 seconds valued it almost twice as much as those who didn't. The hosts discuss how this bias plays out in real-world...

This episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores time pressure as a hidden driver of spending. Lucas and Luna dive into a 2024 study by researchers at Duke and Stanford, which found that shoppers spent an average of 23% more when given a 5-minute time limit compared to no limit. They discuss the concept of 'temporal discounting' and how scarcity mindset—triggered by time constraints—lead...

Episode 93 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores the endowment effect and why physically touching a product dramatically increases your willingness to pay. Lucas and Luna break down a 2024 field experiment where shoppers who held a sweatshirt for 30 seconds bid 67% more in a silent auction than those who didn't. They discuss why the effect is strongest for haptic-oriented categories like a...

Episode 92 of Behavioral Economics dives into the psychology of sales. Lucas and Luna unpack a 2024 experiment showing that consumers actually feel a subtle loss when they see a '50% off' sign — because the brain frames pre-sale price as a forfeited reference point. They explore why a 40% discount feels better than a 50% one when the original price is high, and how retailers use 'sale' framing to...

This episode explores the 'flat-rate bias': why paying a fixed fee for unlimited access — whether at a gym, a streaming service, or a buffet — makes people consume more than they would with a per-use price, even when they'd be happier paying per use. Lucas and Luna dig into a 2015 study from the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota that tracked 7,000 gym members: members who paid...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the anchoring effect — how a single initial price can warp your perception of value for everything that follows. They drill into a famous 1974 study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, where participants spun a wheel of fortune and then guessed the percentage of African nations in the UN. The wheel was rigged — but it di...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the 'cashback illusion' — why people treat cashback rewards as income rather than a price reduction, even when the math is identical. Using a 2025 experiment from the University of Chicago showing that consumers spend more freely with cashback than with an equivalent upfront discount, they unpack the mental accounting err...

Lucas and Luna explore why price-match guarantees actually reduce shopping around. Retailers like Best Buy and Home Depot rely on a behavioral quirk called 'cognitive closure' — once you see a price-match promise, your brain stops searching for better deals, even when the guarantee is hard to use. The hosts break down a 2024 study from the Journal of Marketing Research showing that price-match pol...

We explore why your brain mentally reclassifies recurring subscription fees from a discretionary expense into a fixed monthly cost, like rent or a utility bill. Using the example of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, we discuss research from MIT and Stanford showing that people drastically underestimate their total annual subscription spend. Lucas and Luna break down the 'subscription neglect' bias,...

In this episode of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the hidden pain of debit card spending. Drawing on a 2020 study from the Journal of Marketing Research that found debit card users spend 12 to 18 percent less than credit card users in the same scenario, they unpack why paying with a debit card feels like an immediate loss while credit feels like a delayed promise. They d...

Episode 85 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores the 'credit limit effect' — how a higher credit limit changes your spending psychology even if you never max out. Lucas and Luna unpack a 2025 study from the Journal of Consumer Research showing that consumers with a $10,000 limit spend 18% more per month than those with a $5,000 limit, controlling for income and credit score. They discuss t...

Episode 84 of Behavioral Economics with Fexingo explores ego depletion: the finding that self-control is a finite resource that gets drained over the course of a day. Lucas and Luna walk through the landmark radish-and-chocolate experiment by Baumeister, then connect it to real spending patterns — like why grocery stores put candy at the checkout and why you spend more on Amazon after a long workd...

Free shipping seems like a straightforward perk, but behavioral economics reveals it hijacks our perception of value in surprising ways. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the 'shipping separability' effect — how splitting a purchase into product price plus shipping fee changes what we're willing to pay. They cite a 2020 Journal of Consumer Research study showing that consumers perceive a $50...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the 'windfall effect' — the psychological quirk that makes people spend found money, tax refunds, and lottery winnings more freely than hard-earned cash. They unpack a 2025 study from the Journal of Consumer Research showing that participants who received an unexpected $50 gift card spent 63% more on indulgences than those who earned the same amount through...

Why are we willing to overpay for a product or service that guarantees a specific outcome—even when the cheaper alternative works just as well? This episode unpacks the certainty premium, the behavioral economics concept that explains why your brain assigns extra value to options that eliminate uncertainty. We look at the well-known 2013 study where consumers paid up to 40 percent more for a digit...