Essay About Choices

A student enters in the canteen of his University and chooses a piece of cake instead of a fruit. An employee is offered to place part of his salary in a retirement plan and chooses not to take advantage of it. A restaurant's customer has left some food in his plate that he can't finish but he leaves without asking for the leftovers. Two teenagers sit on the table in a pub spending most of the night watching their smartphones instead of talking to each other. A woman is going to the gym to lose weight. She can choose to take the stairs or the elevator and she opts for the latter.
All the above examples have something in common. Although these situations have a different topography, they all involve people’s choice between alternative options

The choice could be between different goods or different behaviours. Not choosing can also be considered a choice and often with relevant implications as it will be described in the second part of this paper. (see Sunstein, choosing not to choose) Therefore, it’s not surprising that the study of human choices is a fundamental issue in the fields of both Economy and Psychology.
An important question rises when talking about choices: how do people take decisions and which are the factors that influence their choices?
Different theories have been proposed over time with huge implications in the public domain. The rise of Behavioral Economics, in particular, led in recent years to the development and spread of public policy programs consistent with its core principles all over the world. The most wide spread is defined as Nudge.
It is necessary few main concepts to be defined in order to have a more clear understanding of some of the most recent developments in the field of the study/science of decisions. First, it will be relevant to provide a definition of rationality for the better understanding of the theoretical background and secondly will follow a description of the different nature of the proposed