Joshua Tasoff

Who they are

Tasoff works in behavioural economics. This page records only his role as stated by the university and the content of the cited paper. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

Everyone believes in redemption (2014), with Letzler. Participants were asked how likely they were to redeem a mail-in form for money, and then had the chance to do so. Their predictions overstated what they actually did by about 49 percentage points. The researchers tested three interventions. Telling people how a previous group had performed reduced this overoptimism by 7 percentage points, and reminding them of the deadline reduced it by 8, but neither effect was statistically significant. Reducing the transaction cost of redeeming reduced overoptimism by 26 percentage points, a significant effect of roughly half. All three interventions increased redemption, but none had a statistically significant effect on what people believed they would do. The authors concluded that weak attention to costs is an important driver of overoptimism.

Key ideas

The study is a clean demonstration that knowing about a tendency does not stop it. People went on expecting to complete the task at roughly the same rate whatever they were told, and the one change that made a real difference was making the task itself easier. Nudge: The Final Edition reports the study in its chapter on sludge as evidence that removing friction works better than warnings or reminders. The same logic applies to cancellation routes, where each extra step is a cost that customers tend to underweight when they sign up.

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