What We Never Do
Clarity about what this publication is and is not. The boundaries are not disclaimers. They are the foundation of what makes the content trustworthy.
We never give financial advice.
Nothing published on this site constitutes financial advice, investment guidance, or a recommendation to change your spending behaviour in any specific way. We describe mechanisms documented in academic literature. What you do with that understanding is entirely your own decision. This distinction is not a legal formality. It reflects a genuine difference between explaining how something works and telling you what to do about it. Those are different activities, and we only do the first.
We never position this as therapy or psychological support.
Behavioural economics is a research discipline, not a therapeutic framework. The findings we discuss come from controlled experiments, field studies, and published papers. Reading about the anchoring effect does not constitute psychological intervention. If you are experiencing difficulties with spending that feel beyond your control, that is a matter for a qualified mental health professional. We are not that, and we do not pretend to be adjacent to it.
We never fabricate data or invent statistics.
Every claim that carries a number, a percentage, or a causal assertion on this site traces to a named study. We do not generate impressive-sounding statistics to make an article feel more authoritative. When research findings are ambiguous, contested, or limited in their generalisability, we say that explicitly. Precision about what the evidence actually shows is more useful than false confidence about what it might suggest.
We never use urgency or scarcity language to drive engagement.
The irony of a publication about scarcity triggers using scarcity triggers would not be lost on our readers. We do not write "read this before it's too late" or "the one thing you must know." Those constructions are the exact mechanisms we study. Using them to promote our own content would be a form of bad faith. Articles publish when they are ready. They remain available. There is no urgency.
We never claim that understanding a bias eliminates it.
One of the more inconvenient findings in behavioural economics research is that cognitive awareness of a bias does not reliably neutralise it. Kahneman himself has written about this. Knowing about the anchoring effect does not make you immune to anchors. We do not promise that reading our articles will change your behaviour. We describe what is happening. That is the complete scope of what we offer.
We never write about Romanian retailers to embarrass or attack them.
Mega Image arranges its shelves using planogram science. eMAG uses price anchoring. These are standard retail and e-commerce practices used by every major retailer globally. Describing them is not an accusation. The same techniques appear at Carrefour, at Kaufland, at Amazon, at every major online marketplace. Our focus on Romanian retail contexts is about relevance to readers, not about criticism of specific companies.
We describe mechanisms. Accurately. With sources.
The goal is a publication where a reader can understand why their decision-making works the way it does in specific commercial environments. Not to fix them. Not to sell them something. To give them an accurate description of a process that is already happening, whether or not they read about it.
Behavioural economics research is genuinely interesting. The experiments that underpin it are often surprising. The applications to everyday Romanian shopping environments are direct and observable. That is what we write about.
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