In case you were too busy reading actual news to notice, the Oscar nominations came out this week. I’m embarrassed to admit that of the 10 Best Picture nominees, I’ve seen just one — and it was a cartoon.

Maybe I’ll have to check out some of the others. I certainly wouldn’t be the only person watching a movie based purely on Oscar’s seal of approval. Research by Randy Nelson, professor of economics and finance at Colby College, found that a best picture nomination can significantly boost a film’s ticket sales. As Nelson tells it:

[W]e compared box office data for every film nominated for Best Picture, Actor/Actress and Supporting Actor/ Actress from 1978 to 1987 with data for 131 “non-nominated” movies released in the same weeks as the lauded films. … Our results indicate that on average a nomination for Supporting Actor or Actress is worth $147,131; a nomination for Lead Actor or Actress, $476,617; and for Best Picture, $4,799,118.

If you ask me (and why wouldn’t you?), what we have here is a case of social norming — specifically, moviegoers responding to messages from the authority figures at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After all, who knows movies better than the Hollywood elite?

There might also be a little “keeping up with the Joneses” thrown in. Would you rather say you’ve seen four or five of the Best Picture nominees or just one (or none)? Only a philistine would take pride in such cultural ignorance.

That’s why I’m slapping on some blue face paint and going to Avatar.

Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard professor of economics and 2002 receipient of a MacArthur genius grant, explains how applying the behavioral sciences can help us solve “the last mile” of social problems — that is, reaching the subgroup of people who aren’t responding to the available solutions.

I’m just saying: The only reason I didn’t win a Grammy on Sunday is because there isn’t a category for “Laziest Non-Musician.”

Last week, I had to schedule my sweet ride (Honda Civics qualify as sweet rides, right?) for its 100,000-mile maintenance. That sounds easy enough. Here’s the problem: Doing so required a phone call. I hate talking on the phone. That’s not an exaggeration – I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.

Compounding the problem, placing this phone call would require me to log on to the Internet, chase down the number for my friendly automotive price gouger, push a whole bunch of buttons, and then endure what was sure to be the most painful phone call of my life. Who has time for all of that? I’ve got blogs to write!

Then I had one of those flashes of genius that make things like Three Stooges movies and Skittles possible.

“What if I just had Jill call for me?”

This Consumerology thing has taught me a lot about procrastination and, in turn, a lot about myself. I wanted to take care of my car, but the hassles kept getting in the way. I knew I’d be more likely to take my car in if I could somehow circumvent those obstacles.

Being the kind and patient woman that she is, my wife set up the appointment for me.

Should I have been able to take care of this by myself like a grown-up? Sure … but there’s a large gap between what I should do and what I actually do.

Steve Jobs cranked up his technolust juggernaut yesterday by announcing what we Apple freaks have all been waiting for — the iPad tablet.  (Even though I am not planning on buying one straight out of the gate, I am slightly — but only slightly — ashamed to admit that I knew with certainty the day of the big announcement and completely forgot that the State of the Union Address was the same evening.)

CNNMoney reported gyrations in Apple’s stock around the announcement:

In the 12 hours running up to the event, there were some pretty bold statements being made about how the announcement would be more about content creation than just cool hardware.

To wit, Wired reported the following very early yesterday morning:

Apple’s goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content – in addition to offering a new avenue for content producers to make money. That platform will likely be far broader than just a tablet device, and will extend to every device or computer that iTunes touches.

So what’s the connection?  I think there’s something to be learned about expectations and loss aversion here.  Just a hunch (and looking at these things through the retrospectroscope can be wildly misleading), but here’s where I’m headed.  Just before the party started, people probably expected two things: the announcement would transcend cool hardware and show off an entire mobile content ecosystem, and the device would cost about a thousand bucks (maybe less with a contract).

And here’s how the facts unfolded yesterday.  First, it became clear that this was mostly about a device; a device that could immediately run apps for the iPhone, but certainly not the content creation ecosystem that Wired suggested hours earlier.  Because we were expecting more, this looks like a loss.  Stock price?  Slump-o.

Then Jobs announced the pricing: less than $500 for the entry-level model, a relatively modest $1 a day plan for all-you-can-use 3G data, and the ability to cancel the data service at any time.  These price points were uniformly more attractive than people were expecting; there’s an expected loss avoided.  Stock price? Surge-o.

Expectations matter because they set the reference point for how we evaluate options and opportunities: If reality looks worse than we expected, it’s a loss.  And setting expectations is critical for new products that people have no idea how to value.  One wonders what would have happened had the expectation of that ecosystem not been set.

The New York Times reports that savvy colleges are enjoying a 25% jump in admissions applications, despite a lagging economy.  The secret?  Using proven principles from behavioral economics and consumer marketing sciences.  This is giving little schools such as St. Rose in Albany a big boost in applications:

Last fall the college sent out 30,000 bright red “Exclusive Scholar Applications” to high school seniors that promised to waive the $40 application fee, invited them to skip the dreaded essay, and assured a decision in three weeks. Because the application arrived with the students’ names and other information already filled in, applying required little more than a signature.

This is exactly the sort of thing that hyperbolic discounting would suggest: remove as many of the upfront costs as possible (the application fee, the essay, even portions of the application) and you’ll see a big pop as you tap latent demand.

Now if they’d just waive the tuition…

The Nudge blog points us to a weekend New York Times piece that encourages adoption of automatic tax returns — that is, returns where the government provides the financial information it’s already collected about you from employers, universities, financial institutions, and the like.  The result: an easier, more transparent return, with the opportunity to correct errors between government and personal records before paperwork is filed.

Requiring taxpayers to file returns without being told what the government already knows makes as much sense “as if Visa sent customers a blank piece of paper, requiring that they assemble their receipts, list their purchases — and pay a fine if they forget one,” said Joseph Bankman, a professor at the Stanford Law School.

The article describes a small pilot program for automatic state returns in California.  It’s little-known, but extremely popular with those who have tried it.  At the federal level, though, there are a couple reasons automatic tax returns haven’t taken off.  A big one: companies that sell tax-preparation software are lobbying hard against it.

To read the full piece, click here.

Jay Leno announced way back in 2004 that he would step down from The Tonight Show and hand the keys over to Conan O’Brien. (Watch for yourself.) This is precommitment on an impressive time frame – five years in advance of execution.

Roll the clock forward to tonight, and we see this commitment unwinding very quickly after its execution. (Conan joked earlier this week that he should have known something was wrong when he received a 2010 calendar as a gift from NBC… and it included only the month of January.)

We’re big fans of precommitment: making a decision today about future behavior. So where did Leno’s precommitment go awry? Perhaps it was that the decision was made too far in advance, with too much opportunity for his preferences and situations to change.

Or maybe it’s that Leno didn’t put enough bite into his precommitment. This type of choice architecture seems to work best when we make decisions today that change our future options or irrevocably alter the incentives the future us face. As far as we know, it’s not Leno that’s forking over the $40 million it’s costing to scoot O’Brien and crew out of The Tonight Show studio.

What Leno did do was make a public statement about his intentions. Five years *is* a long time. Situations change, and many of us would understand had he decided in the intervening period to rethink his decision. But that’s not what happened. He did step down, and when things didn’t work — for both his new show and The Tonight Show — he (and NBC) wanted to undo it all.

This may make perfect business sense, and NBC (as well as all the other networks) is a business. This may be the right thing to do in the long haul, from a market perspective. But Leno’s precommitment took place in the social realm, not the market realm. It will be very interesting to see whether viewers care about this change of heart.

Lose It! is an iPhone app that harnesses a couple psychological principles to increase the chances of successful weight loss.

We’ve written before about how tracking personal data can help stave off procrastination.  In an assessment of self-measurement and Nike+, a gadget that tracks personal workout data, Bob wrote:

The feedback offered by Nike+ and other self-measurement schemes offers the ability to monitor gains that might otherwise be too far in the future to enjoy.  In a sense, knowing our numbers allows us to get a little taste in the present of benefits that are to come.  And for some of us, that just may be enough to tip the scale toward behavior that benefits us in the longer term.

The same holds true here: Lose It! allows users to enter the foods they eat and exercise they complete, then calculates the calories in and out each day based on a few key statistics the user provides (weight, height, and so forth).  There are charts and graphs showing data such as calorie intake, nutrient intake, and calorie budget for the week.  For those who want more details, there are in-depth online reports and exportable data.

The application has also recently added in the principle of social persuasion, allowing your friends to track your progress and you to do the same for them.  Those extra eyes are an incentive to stay honest.

To top it off, the app is free.  It’s No. 32 on the top free downloads, and the company says it’s been downloaded more than 3 million times.

For more on Lose It!, click here.

I logged onto Facebook last night to find that Bob had posted the following as his status update:

India foxtrot yankee oscar uniform charlie alpha november uniform november delta echo romeo sierra tango alpha november delta tango hotel india sierra charlie oscar papa yankee alpha november delta papa alpha sierra tango echo tango oscar yankee oscar uniform romeo sierra tango alpha tango uniform sierra

For the uninitiated, that’s the NATO phonetic alphabet, used to ensure letters and numbers can be understood over radio and phone connections. The first letter of each word represents the letter of the alphabet. Once decoded, the above says: “If you can understand this, copy and paste to your status.”

A few moments later, my boyfriend logged in, saw Bob’s Facebook status, and did just that. Then my brother followed suit. I don’t know how many of their friends jumped on board, but comments on their statuses filled up with NATO alphabet speak in minutes — all written by folks more familiar with, IDK, texting.

That’s the power of social persuasion: A couple folks make it cool to get your geek on (or drive SUVs, or get spray-on tans), and suddenly everybody’s doing it.

Humans are really, really good at imagining a status quo that’s different than the one they’re actually in.  In fact, we’re so good at it that we can consume that imagined state as though we are actually living it.  (Hence, the delicious pleasure that comes with daydreaming.)

When we imagine a state that’s slightly better than where we are and the path to getting there is clear, we may feel regret.  That’s loss aversion doing its thing to us; the imagined state becomes the status quo, and the current state looks like a loss.  Because we work harder to avoid the loss than to pursue gains, we’ll go out of our way to close that gap and make the imagined status quo the real thing.

If this sounds theoretical, think about how you feel when you miss a plane by 5 minutes.  Now compare that to how you feel when you miss it by 30 minutes.  That extra little sting you’re feeling reflects your ability to imagine having made the flight; it’s just easier to imagine that when you barely miss the plane than when you miss it by quite a bit.

This is the same sort of thing that’s in play with the illusion of progress effect.  It’s easier to imagine being in a different status quo when that state looks and feels closer than when it’s far off.  Good marketers can use this to their advantage by giving us the sense that we’re oh-so-close to getting something good.

Here’s a good example from Amazon: 

The blood pressure monitor sells for $49.93, and Amazon notes that if I spend more than $50, I will get a free subscription to one of two magazines. Darn! Just missed a year of Conde Nast Traveler or Architectural Digest by 7 cents.  Maybe I’ll look for a slightly more expensive monitor…

I’ve no clue as to whether this is intentional (and the offer says that it has to be a single purchase), but it seems mighty close to the actual price.  And because the subscription is noted to have a value of $10, they don’t have a lot of headroom.  Still, it’s easy to imagine meeting that threshold and enjoying the FREE (ha!) magazine.