---
type: "synthesis"
sources: ["attention"]
tags: ["behavioral-economics", "psychology"]
related: ["cross-consumer-agency-paradox", "cross-habit-moat-vs-agentic-rationality"]
id: "cross-behavioral-economics-substrate"
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-attention"
originDay: 4
articleStem: "hbr-seg-attention"
sourceUrl: "(unified vault: 8 sources)"
sourceTitle: "HBR — Demand Ⅰ-B · Attention economy / GTM shift & habit-moat"
---
Strip the industry vocabulary and every article in this corpus is applied behavioral economics. The same handful of cognitive mechanisms recur:

- **Habit loop (cue→routine→reward):** [[prereq-habit-loop]] powers [[concept-habit-moat]] (A007) and, via gacha ([[prereq-gacha-mechanics]]), [[concept-blind-box-marketing]] (A068).
- **Sunk-cost fallacy:** the engine of [[concept-subscription-psychology]] (A069) — and the *precise* bias A007 wants firms to exploit and A069 says agents will neutralize.
- **Choice overload / cognitive load:** [[concept-cognitive-burden-of-choice]] (A070) explains why more ad options can *reduce* engagement ([[contrarian-choice-as-burden]]).
- **Two-sided message / blemish effect:** small disclosed negatives reduce uncertainty ([[claim-negative-info-reduces-uncertainty]], A065).
- **Scarcity & identity:** [[concept-identity-through-scarcity]] (A068) and status-signaling that A069's counter-perspective says agents can be *configured* to respect.

The meta-insight: **the discipline is unified, but AI splits its audience in two.** For *humans*, the biases are levers to pull (A007, A065, A068, A070). For *rational agents* (A069), the same biases are bugs to route around. The strategic question every firm now faces — 'am I designing for a biased human or a rational agent?' — is the behavioral-economics fault line running through the whole corpus. See [[cross-consumer-agency-paradox]].