1 . So you’re trying to cut back on spending. Congratulations. You’ve made a wise decision but it is not necessarily a path that is easy to follow. The temptation to over-spend is an ever-present, inviting itch that you’ll need to avoid scratching. But, armed with the right set of principles. you can keep it at bay.

If you are going shopping, make sure you only take enough money with you to buy what you need. Extra money is often an excuse for extra spending. If you shop with charge cards, be sure that credit limit is only high enough to keep you from making impulsive purchases.

Separate necessary spending and indulgence spending. It’s a good way to keep that money from flying out of your wallet. If you always pay for necessities first then you won’t have the cash flow for the extras that, while you’d love to have them, you don’t really need them.

Take another person along who understand your goal of keeping spending down. They can be your second conscience when you see that cute purse on sale and are attempting to justify the purchase. A frown and a shake of the head from your shopping buddy might be the extra signal that persuades you to leave it behind.

Don’t spend more than you have to, even on necessities. Shopping around you’ll find that many everyday items that you do have to buy can be bought for less. Try the store brand instead of the name brand, and shop where you can find bargains. Saving a little money in this area may allow you a bit of self-indulgent spending now and then, as long as you have to “earn” that extra spending by saving.

2 . Picture 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. Medium may be the perfect amount of soda for you, but the large is only a quarter more. If you're like most people, you end up buying the large（and taking a bathroom break midshow）.

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

I have written about this peculiarity in human nature before with my friend Dan Ariely, who studied this phenomenon extensively after noticing pricing for subscriptions（订阅）to The Economist. 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. But the addition of the bad option made people much more likely to choose the more expensive print plus digital option.

Brain scientists call this effect "asymmetric dominance" and it means that people gravitate toward the choice nearest a clearly inferior option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. Lucky for consumers, almost no one in the business community understands it.

The decoy effect works because of the way our brains assign value when making choices. Value is almost never absolute; rather, we decide an object's value relative to our other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation changes.

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