What’s a urinal fly, and what does it have to with winning a Nobel Prize?

If you want to understand why the University of Chicago's Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics this year, look no further than the urinal fly.

In the early 1990s, the story goes, the cleaning manager at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport was trying to reduce “spillage” around urinals. He settled on etching small, photorealistic images of flies on the urinals, right near the drain. The idea was to give people something to aim at.