Every single website will tell you to get to Bordeaux from London by going into Paris now again. And so one of the things that really worries me is that our markets partly intelligent because human decision-making is messy. Markets can then aggregate preferences from a whole bunch of people who have come up with problems from a different angle. When you actually make choice uniform by didn't of forcing everybody to go through the same set of questions in the same order, do you actually make markets stupider?
Author and Advertising Executive Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy talks about his book Alchemy with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Sutherland makes the case for the magic (yes, magic!) of advertising and branding in helping markets work well. This is a wide-ranging conversation on consumer choice, public policy, travel, real estate, and corporate decision-making using insights from behavioral economics and decades of experience in the world of advertising.