The boom of the cheap and trendy bus service that links our cities together is old news to most of us East Coasters. You can’t bring up the BoltBus in a New York City office without inadvertently starting a lively Bolt/Mega debate. Everyone has opinions and these opinions – qualitative bits of data – are often what we’re relegated to evaluate before we choose. Based on the opinions of friends whose tastes are most in line with mine, I chose to take the BoltBus, on which I now sit, to Washington DC.

But what if this little heuristic of relying on the opinions of my likeminded chums leads me astray? Well, I could eliminate the risk of a bad decision by researching extensively. The research would involve screening potential advisers on myriad criteria for my travel preferences and general expectations. Thorough? Sure! Data-informed? Absolutely. Efficient? Not in the least.

In the January-February edition of the Harvard Business Review, Richard H. Thaler and Will Tucker explore this idea of data-driven decision making from the consumer side. The authors predict that the movement towards “Smart Disclosure” (i.e. “the timely release of complex information and data in standardized, machine-readable formats in ways that enable consumers to make informed decisions”) will have profound effects on policy, economy, and businesses. Incidentally, this movement will enable consumers and business alike to make better-informed decisions that are not only thorough and data-informed, but also are efficient. Based on their hypothesis, the authors anticipate the rise of the choice engine, a platform that will store consumer’s personal data and spew recommendations that are based specifically on the data the consumer provides.