Very good book .. must read
Excerpt from book -
Single CEOs, wishing to seem attractive, take bigger risks
Companies run by unmarried CEOs appear to invest more aggressively and take greater risks—their investment level is 10% higher, on average, and their stock-return volatility is 3% greater than other firms’, say Nikolai L. Roussanov of The Wharton School and Pavel G. Savor of the University of Pennsylvania. The numbers are consistent with evidence that single men take on greater risk than their married peers in hopes of being more attractive to potential mates, the researchers say.
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Consumers are repelled by worn-out money and want to spend it
People who were given worn-out $20 bills spent 82% more of the money than consumers who were given four crisp $5 bills, reversing the expected “denomination effect,” which typically leads people to spend less from larger-denomination
bills, say Fabrizio Di Muro of the University of Winnipeg and Theodore J. Noseworthy of the University of Guelph, both in Canada. People tend to be disgusted by worn bills and want to get rid of them because of presumed contamination from other people, the researchers found.
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A task looks lighter when help is promised
People who were asked to guess the weight of a box of potatoes gave an estimate that was 10% less if they were told they’d get help lifting it, according to a team led by Adam Doerrfeld of Rutgers University. When participants were told they’d have to lift the box solo, they correctly guessed it weighed 10.5 pounds, on average. When they were informed that another person would help them, they guessed 9.4 pounds. Our perceptions are shaped not only by what we can do by ourselves but by what we believe we can do with others’ help, the researchers say.
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Newspapers Make Politician behave better
A study in Norway by Christian Bruns and Oliver Himmler of the University of Goettingen in Germany shows that a better informed electorate induces politicians to behave better. Each 1-standard-deviation increase in a newspaper’s circulation or coverage of local news leads to governmental efficiency gains of between US $368,000 and $460,000 annually for a municipality of an average population of 10,600.
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Being sleepy makes you more inclined to surf the web at work
For every hour of interrupted sleep the night before, research participants engaged in 8.4 minutes more cyberloafing- checking personal e-mails or visiting unrelated websites- during a 42-minute task, says a team led by David T. Wagner of Singapore Management University. The effect of lost sleep on cyber loafing at work is supported by data showing that on the Monday after the switch to Daylight Savings Time, Google users search for 3.1% to 6.4% more entertainment related websites in comparison with other Mondays.
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CEOs get very little time to think and work alone
In a typical 55 hour workweek, CEO’s spend an average of just 6 hours working alone, according to a study by researchers from the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School. Te Wall Street Journal reports that 18 of the CEO’s weekly hours were spent in meetings, 5 were occupied by business meals, and 4 were spent in phone calls and conference calls, with much of the rest devoted to miscellaneous activities ranging from travel to personal appointments.
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