Loan and Deposit Pricing as Banks Go Increasingly Mobile

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The shift toward mobile banking has allowed banks to close branches. With the remaining branches, banks tend to:

Offer loan and deposit pricing better than mobile customers get, as a sign of loyalty to branch customers.

Make no change in pricing.

Charge customers who use bank branches slightly more for loans and pay them slightly less on deposits.

Read on: Customers who stick with the branches tend to be older and less affluent.

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Food delivery apps’ guarantees on timely delivery, typically within 30 minutes, predictably lead to collisions, injuries and some deaths. Fining the speeding drivers, China has learned:

Solves the problem; drivers slow down.

Causes the companies that operate the apps to stop guaranteeing timely delivery.

Doesn’t work, as company penalties for slow delivery are often bigger than traffic fines.

Read on: Thirty years ago in the U.S., Domino’s stuck with a 30-minute guarantee for years, despite multiple deaths, finally abandoning the guarantee after a $79 million jury verdict.

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COVID-19 created an urgent need for vaccines and other treatments. Pharmaceutical companies responded by:

Emphasizing development of new drugs, which often take years to gain approval.

Letting government and academic institutions take the lead on most testing of existing medicines, which could get to patients sooner.

Taking an even less prominent role in testing drugs for which generic competitors exist.

All of the above.

Read on: New drugs, when approved, come with a 20-year patent that gives a company an exclusive and thus lucrative market.

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Induced forgetting describes a political operative, say, telling you something irrelevant about an issue so that you’ll forget something they want you to disregard. The practice:

Is most effective at getting people to forget positive impressions.

Negative impressions.

Equally successful at inducing you to forget positive or negative impressions.

Read on: Suppose a local policy aimed at reducing homelessness had some success, and some drawbacks. Introducing information generally about the program, but about neither result would more likely subdue memories of positive outcomes.

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Some companies disclose greenhouse gas emissions and their equivalents and some don’t. Disclosures are mostly limited to Scope 1 emissions, those coming directly from a company’s operations. Scope 3 emissions, such as those of suppliers, aren’t disclosed. An analysis suggests:

Companies that voluntarily disclose Scope 1, when adding in Scope 3 estimates, are responsible for lower emissions than nondisclosing companies.

Voluntary disclosure tends to go hand in hand with higher Scope 3 emissions and thus higher emissions overall.

Disclose, don’t disclose, companies in like industries have identical emissions when Scope 3 is included.

Read on: Scope 3 operations, the upstream part of the supply chain, are far more carbon intensive.