Curation

Curation

When we were working on the original version of this book, we would often meet at our favorite lunch haunt and then wander into a nearby bookstore to continue our chat. There are many good bookstores in the University of Chicago neighborhood, Hyde Park. It may surprise some readers to find us using the present tense in the previous sentence, but many remain in business. (No longer a Chicagoan, Sunstein misses the bookstores of Hyde Park, but he cherishes the Concord Bookshop in Massachusetts.) How can a brick-and-mortar bookstore survive in the post-Amazon age, even in the midst of a pandemic? Although some bookstores have branched out into selling coffee and knickknacks, in Hyde Park and Concord they still concentrate on books. What do successful bookstores (and other small retail establishments) have in common? They are good curators.

Curation is essential for any business that wants to compete with online giants. Amazon sells, essentially, every book that is in print, and many that are not, and it can deliver to your home quickly or to your tablet in less than a minute. This means that a traditional retailer cannot compete by offering more choices. It is hard to beat “anything you want.” In fact, the prospect of wandering around a gigantic warehouse crammed with (only) a million books is completely unattractive. Yet shopping on Amazon is simple and easy (and even during COVID-19, you never needed to wear a mask). How do both options survive? The answer, of course, is choice architecture. Small shops compete via curation, while online megastores use navigation tools to make finding and choosing among so many options easy.

There is not a single recipe for curation, any more than there is a single way to run a successful business. Some great bookstores prosper not only because they curate well but also because they give customers a terrific experience, full of surprises, serendipity, and delight, as they wander from the fiction section to the mystery corner. Other successful bookstores specialize in travel or science fiction or art. Similarly, some great restaurants are great because they are good at one thing, and they keep doing that thing. The best places to get ramen, hot dogs, tacos, pizza, and ribs are often storefronts that sell just one thing. Singapore is famous for its hawker centers, where each stall focuses on one type of dish. Two of these food stalls have even won Michelin stars, although a meal only costs a few dollars and the stalls look like any other small street food stall.1 They are curating.

For many years, Thaler’s favorite wine shop in Chicago was a tiny place with boxes piled to the ceiling in no apparent order. But the owner, who was always there, knew every bottle of wine in the store and knew the tastes of his customers about as well as a good algorithm would. Maybe better, because he would say to try a bottle of something because it was novel, and Thaler would not mind bearing a bit of risk. Serendipity can be fun, for books, music, and movies, as well as wine. Good curation combines getting rid of bad options and introducing novel ones.

Choice architecture in domains from human resource departments to social security to health care must use some combination of curation and navigation tools. If they don’t, people will flounder. As we have mentioned, some people have a simple philosophy: Just Maximize Choices. That’s not always a bad idea, but it can be problematic without sophisticated choice architecture tools. Instead, a well-curated small selection and/or a good default can produce quite satisfactory outcomes.