Ogilvy gave his famous speech on branding in Chicago. Herbert A. Simon had published an article, “A Behavioural Model of Rational Choice” in the Quarterly Journal, which for the first time questioned whether economic behaviour was only rational. By modelling the various alternatives open to close, the relationships between them which determined the “pay-offs”, and the order of preference of those pay-offs, he concluded that real behaviour was largely unlikely ever to conform to the rules. How, for instance, can one ever be sure that a pay-off X will emerge from an outcome Y? What happens when alternatives are evaluated separately rather than all together before the process of choice starts? The economist Richard H. Thaler adds: Following Simon’s lead subsequent research has identified not only 150 or more heuristics or biases (mental shortcuts) that lead us to often make irrational (or erroneous) decisions, but also that the presentation of too many options can lead us to make no decision at all. Contrary to the received wisdom that abundant choice makes it more likely homo economicus will make the decision, the “paradox of choice” (as coined by Professor Barry Schwartz) means that biases are more likely to come to bear and we will make a decision based on much more 5 limited criteria, or even delegate or defer the choice. The question then comes: how do we organize the messages and the cues in such a way that they might better push us into a change of behaviour? Otherwise, this will all remain fascinating but useless. The Nudge While Herbert Simon’s approach was largely falling on deaf ears in the financial world as it was so far removed from the economic orthodoxy of the day, there were a group of economists from the Chicago School that developed his work much further. The most famous of these are Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Together they built on Simon’s work by taking the irrational operator and categorizing him as a “human”, as opposed to the fictional “econ” of neoclassical economics. Their work led them to look at the heuristics and biases that influence all manner of economic decision-making and particularly to advocate “libertarian