I’ve just read ‘Habit’ by Charles Duhigg - he describes habits as loops of ‘cue’, ‘routine’ and ‘reward’. He discusses how they are difficult to eradicate, and can only be replaced by better habits. The method of replacing them is to swap the ‘routine’ to something that delivers the same reward, but from a different routine. For example, when I get off the bus at 6 (the cue), I go to buy a coffee (routine), because I enjoy the burst of socialising the chat in the shop provides (reward).
Could dozens provide a way to change our spending habits? If someone consistently overspends, and wants to cut down, it could provide a notification to do another routine. For the previous example, this might be a notification at 5:55 to call my friend from home - thus providing the same socialisation reward but through a different routine. Similarly, if people spend due to boredom, could dozens respond by providing a notification or link to an interesting article/ video to pre-emptively alleviate the boredom - without the asos order!
I appreciate this could sound a bit Orwellian and would require processing a lot of data, but it would be opt in and so remain up to the user. Just a thought, but may be useful to facilitate a shift from spending to saving habits?