Coherent Holes
Now listen carefully, because this is where the bizarre, byzantine and seemingly disparate behavioural biases that afflict our every monetary movement start to coalesce into a single, coherent whole. Or at least a set of coherent wholes. Or is that coherent holes?
Mental accounting isn’t about the madness of the dark denizens of accounting departments, although that’d be as good a subject as any. No, in fact it’s the strange way that we humans turn the perfectly designed medium of exchange we call “money” into an irrational, segregated and non-transferrable set of silos to which we then apply all the normal battery of biased behaviours, thus gearing up our irrationality to a marvellously unhinged degree.
Now listen carefully, because this is where the bizarre, byzantine and seemingly disparate behavioural biases that afflict our every monetary movement start to coalesce into a single, coherent whole. Or at least a set of coherent wholes. Or is that coherent holes?
Mental accounting isn’t about the madness of the dark denizens of accounting departments, although that’d be as good a subject as any. No, in fact it’s the strange way that we humans turn the perfectly designed medium of exchange we call “money” into an irrational, segregated and non-transferrable set of silos to which we then apply all the normal battery of biased behaviours, thus gearing up our irrationality to a marvellously unhinged degree.
