Latest / Behavioral Economics with Fexingo: Decision Making, Bias, and How People Really Spend
Why Your Brain Treats a Surcharge as Theft But a Fee as Fair
You swipe your card at a convenience store and the screen adds a 50-cent surcharge. You feel cheated. Yet you pay a $3.50 ATM fee without blinking. Why? In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the psychology of surcharge vs. fee: how framing, pain of paying, and mental accounting make identical costs feel radically different. They break down research from Cornell and MIT, the 2012 class-action lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard that reshaped the surcharge landscape, and the recent 2025 EU ruling on interchange fees. They also look at how companies like Ticketmaster and Uber exploit this…
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