Providing a choice that will be selected if a consumer does not override it—known as the default option—is an easy way to “nudge” people toward a decision and influences behavior in powerful ways to increase support for organ donation, retirement plan choices, car insurance and service-sector gratuity. But a new paper co-written by a team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts on the psychology of decision-making finds that default actions aren’t universally or consistently effective, and that time constraints can play an important role in influencing those decisions.