Default options become powerful when

Status quo is easily exploited. One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people adopt what we call the 'Yeah, whatever' heuristic. A good illustration is the carry-over effect in television viewing. Network executives spend a lot of time working on scheduling because they know that a viewer who starts the evening on a particular network channel tends to stay there. Since remote controls have been pervasive in this country for decades, the actual switching costs in this context are literally one thumb press. But when one show ends and the next one comes on, a surprisingly high number of viewers implicitly say 'Yeah, whatever' and keep watching. Nor is the reader of a particular magazine the only victim of automatic renewal of magazine subscriptions. Those in charge of circulation know that when renewal is automatic, and when people have to make a phone call to cancel, the likelihood of renewal is much higher than when people have to indicate that they actually want to continue to receive the magazine. The combination of loss aversion with mindless choosing implies that if an option is designated as the default, it will attract a large market share. In many contexts defaults have some extra nudging power because consumers may feel, rightly or wrongly, that default options come with an implicit endorsement from the default setter, be it the employer, the government or the TV scheduler. For this and other reasons, setting the best possible defaults will be a theme to explore by scholars.