2 . According to a recent survey carried out by The Economist (经济学家) magazine, Ireland is by far and away the best country in the world to live in.

Once Ireland joined the EU in 1973, the base for economic growth started to be put into place. The 1990s saw the economic growth finally arrive-a total change in Ireland’s economic fortunes was born. The country experienced year-on-year growth of almost ten per cent and now has the fourth-highest GDP per head in the world — a massive 36.5 thousand dollars per person. Coupled with this has been a huge drop in unemployment (失业率) from 20 per cent15 years ago to around four per cent today, all of which has meant Dublin’s newspapers now come with larger job sections and the country is looking to import up to 300 thousand new workers in the next few years.

In many ways, Ireland is the perfect advertisement (广告) for the policies of the IMF and the World Bank as it is one of the few economies that has opened itself up to free trade, foreign investment (投资) and unregulated business activity, cut welfare (福利) spending and checked wage (工资) increases and yet still managed to grow rapidly.

3 . Imagine this: You’re at a movie theater food stand loading up on snacks. You have a choice of a small, medium or large soda. The small is $3.50 and the large is $5.50. It’s a tough decision: The small size may not last you through the whole movie, but $5.50 for some sugary drink seems ridiculous. But there’s a third option, a medium soda for $5.25. The medium might be just right for you, but the large only cost a quarter more. If you’re like the majority of people, you end up buying the large.

If you’re wondering who would purchase the medium soda, the answer is almost no one. Actually, there’s a good chance that the marketing department purposely priced the medium soda as a decoy(诱饵), making you more likely to buy the soda rather than the small.

I have written about this unique human nature previously with my friend Dan Ariely, who, after noticing pricing for subscription(订阅) to The Economist, studied this phenomenon extensively. The digital subscription was $59, the print subscription was $125, and the print plus digital subscription was also $125. No one in their right mind would buy the print subscription when you could get digital as well for the same price, so why was it even an option? Ariely ran an experiment and found that when only the two“real”choices were offered, more people chose the less-expensive digital subscription. However, the bad option increased people’s likelihood of selecting the expensive print plus digital option.

Brain scientists call this effect“asymmetric dominance” and it means that people are attracted to the option that is closest to an obviously inferior(较差的) option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. It works because of the way our brain assign value when making choices. Value is rarely absolute; rather, we decide an object’s value relative to other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation(方程) changes.

6 . The e-commerce company that retailers talk about most these days is neither Amazon, the American giant, nor Alibaba, China’s biggest. It is Pinduoduo (PDD), a Chinese firm that started in 2015 as an online food supplier, but whose success has driven its market value above $200bn. Last year it was China’s fastest-growing Internet stock, rising by 330%.

PDD attracts attention for two reasons. One is its business model. David Liu, vice-president of strategy, explains that it has drawn on the popularity of smart phone in China to create an e-commerce experience in which people club together to buy products from robot vacuum-cleaners to bananas. During the pandemic this has expanded into a fast-growing business across thousands of towns and villages, in which PDD’s users gather to buy local farm produce at low prices. Some call this “community group-buy”. Mr. Liu calls it “interactive commerce”. It is one of the hottest parts of the Chinese Internet.

The second is the way PDD has broken the record of giants of online shopping. Until a few years ago, China’s e-commerce market seemed a two-way competition between Alibaba and JD.com, a competitor platform. No longer. Elinor Leung of CLSA, a brokerage, expects PDD’s share of online retail in China to go beyond that of JD in 2021. She expects the number of users over Alibaba. And although PDD put a huge amount of money to lower the prices of goods, ensuring the customers from poorer parts of China easy access to its app, she thinks it may turn profitable this year.

Remarkably, the key to its success focused on parts of the market they have been unable to reach instead of defeating its bigger competitors. Although online sales of groceries have rocketed during the pandemic, less than a tenth of the 8.1trn yuan ($1.25trn) farm-produce market is bought and sold digitally. “We are continuing to grow the pie,” says Mr Liu. That lesson applies elsewhere too. However, no matter how a future market looks, there is opportunity for new online businesses because e-commerce is at an early stage of development.