Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Author: Richard H. Thaler

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-05-11

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 0393246779

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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Get ready to change the way you think about economics. Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons
Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons

Author: Anne I. Harrington

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0820355631

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Recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience have improved our understanding of why our decision making processes fail to match standard social science assumptions about rationality. As researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have shown, people often depart in systematic ways from the predictions of the rational actor model of classic economic thought because of the influence of emotions, cognitive biases, an aversion to loss, and other strong motivations and values. These findings about the limits of rationality have formed the basis of behavioral economics, an approach that has attracted enormous attention in recent years. This collection of essays applies the insights of behavioral economics to the study of nuclear weapons policy. Behavioral economics gives us a more accurate picture of how people think and, as a consequence, of how they make decisions about whether to acquire or use nuclear arms. Such decisions are made in real-world circumstances in which rational calculations about cost and benefit are intertwined with complicated emotions and subject to human limitations. Strategies for pursuing nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation should therefore, argue the contributors, account for these dynamics in a systematic way. The contributors to this collection examine how a behavioral approach might inform our understanding of topics such as deterrence, economic sanctions, the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and U.S. domestic debates about ballistic missile defense. The essays also take note of the limitations of a behavioral approach for dealing with situations in which even a single deviation from the predictions of any model can have dire consequences.

Behavioral Economics and Its Applications
Behavioral Economics and Its Applications

Author: Peter Diamond

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1400829143

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In the last decade, behavioral economics, borrowing from psychology and sociology to explain decisions inconsistent with traditional economics, has revolutionized the way economists view the world. But despite this general success, behavioral thinking has fundamentally transformed only one field of applied economics-finance. Peter Diamond and Hannu Vartiainen's Behavioral Economics and Its Applications argues that behavioral economics can have a similar impact in other fields of economics. In this volume, some of the world's leading thinkers in behavioral economics and general economic theory make the case for a much greater use of behavioral ideas in six fields where these ideas have already proved useful but have not yet been fully incorporated--public economics, development, law and economics, health, wage determination, and organizational economics. The result is an attempt to set the agenda of an important development in economics--an agenda that will interest policymakers, sociologists, and psychologists as well as economists. Contributors include Ian Ayres, B. Douglas Bernheim, Truman F. Bewley, Colin F. Camerer, Anne Case, Michael D. Cohen, Peter Diamond, Christoph Engel, Richard G. Frank, Jacob Glazer, Seppo Honkapohja, Christine Jolls, Botond Koszegi, Ulrike Malmendier, Sendhil Mullainathan, Antonio Rangel, Emmanuel Saez, Eldar Shafir, Sir Nicholas Stern, Jean Tirole, Hannu Vartiainen, and Timothy D. Wilson.

Handbook of Behavioral Economics - Foundations and Applications 1
Handbook of Behavioral Economics - Foundations and Applications 1

Author:

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2018-09-27

Total Pages: 749

ISBN-13: 0444633898

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Handbook of Behavioral Economics: Foundations and Applications presents the concepts and tools of behavioral economics. Its authors are all economists who share a belief that the objective of behavioral economics is to enrich, rather than to destroy or replace, standard economics. They provide authoritative perspectives on the value to economic inquiry of insights gained from psychology. Specific chapters in this first volume cover reference-dependent preferences, asset markets, household finance, corporate finance, public economics, industrial organization, and structural behavioural economics. This Handbook provides authoritative summaries by experts in respective subfields regarding where behavioral economics has been; what it has so far accomplished; and its promise for the future. This taking-stock is just what Behavioral Economics needs at this stage of its so-far successful career. - Helps academic and non-academic economists understand recent, rapid changes in theoretical and empirical advances within behavioral economics - Designed for economists already convinced of the benefits of behavioral economics and mainstream economists who feel threatened by new developments in behavioral economics - Written for those who wish to become quickly acquainted with behavioral economics

Behavioral Law and Economics
Behavioral Law and Economics

Author: Eyal Zamir

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13: 0190901349

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In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in general. Behavioral Law and Economics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the field. Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman survey the entire body of psychological research that lies at the basis of behavioral analysis of law, and critically evaluate the core methodological questions of this area of research. Following this, the book discusses the fundamental normative questions stemming from the psychological findings on bounded rationality, and explores their implications for setting the law's goals and designing the means to attain them. The book then provides a systematic and critical examination of the contributions of behavioral studies to all major fields of law including: property, contracts, consumer protection, torts, corporate, securities regulation, antitrust, administrative, constitutional, international, criminal, and evidence law, as well as to the behavior of key players in the legal arena: litigants and judicial decision-makers.

Interpreting Consumer Choice
Interpreting Consumer Choice

Author: Gordon Foxall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1135238081

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Interpretive consumer research usually proceeds with a minimum of structure and preconceptions. This book presents a more structured approach than is usual, showing how a simple framework that embodies the rewards and costs associated with consumer choice can be used to interpret a wide range of consumer behaviours from everyday purchasing and saving, innovative choice, imitation, ‘green’ consumer behavior, to compulsive behaviors such as addictions (to shopping, to gambling, to alcohol and other drugs, etc). Foxall takes a qualitative approach to interpreting behavior, focusing on the epistemological problems that arise in such research and emphasizing the emotional as well as cognitive aspects of consumption. The author argues that consumer behaviour can be understood with the aid of a very simple model that proposes how the consequences of consumption impact consumers’ subsequent choices. The objective is to show that a basic model can be used to interpret consumer behaviour in general, not in isolation from the marketing influences that shape it, but as a course of human choice that is dynamically linked with managerial concerns.

The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse
The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse

Author: Frank J. Chaloupka

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-02-15

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0226100499

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Conventional wisdom once held that the demand for addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs was unlike that for any other economic good and, therefore, unresponsive to traditional market forces. Recently, however, researchers from two disparate fields, economics and behavioral psychology, have found that increases in the overall price of an addictive substance can significantly reduce both the number of users and the amounts those users consume. Changes in the "full price" of addictive substances—including monetary value, time outlay, effort to obtain, and potential penalties for illegal use—yield marked variations in behavioral outcomes and demand. The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse brings these distinctive fields of study together and presents for the first time an integrated assessment of their data and results. Unique and innovative, this multidisciplinary volume will serve as an important resource in the current debates concerning alcohol and drug use and abuse and the impacts of legalizing illicit drugs.

Behavioral Economics and Public Health
Behavioral Economics and Public Health

Author: Christina A. Roberto

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 019939833X

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Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time.

Behavioral Economics
Behavioral Economics

Author: Masao Ogaki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 9811064393

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This book is intended as a textbook for a course in behavioral economics for advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have already learned basic economics. The book will also be useful for introducing behavioral economics to researchers. Unlike some general audience books that discuss behavioral economics, this book does not take a position of completely negating traditional economics. Its position is that both behavioral and traditional economics are tools that have their own uses and limitations. Moreover, this work makes clear that knowledge of traditional economics is a necessary basis to fully understand behavioral economics. Some of the special features compared with other textbooks on behavioral economics are that this volume has full chapters on neuroeconomics, cultural and identity economics, and economics of happiness. These are distinctive subfields of economics that are different from, but closely related to, behavioral economics with many important overlaps with behavioral economics. Neuroeconomics, which is developing fast partly because of technological progress, seeks to understand how the workings of our minds affect our economic decision making. In addition to a full chapter on neuroeconomics, the book provides explanations of findings in neuroeconomics in chapters on prospect theory (a major decision theory of behavioral economics under uncertainty), intertemporal economic behavior, and social preferences (preferences that exhibit concerns for others). Cultural and identity economics seek to explain how cultures and people’s identities affect economic behaviors, and economics of happiness utilizes measures of subjective well-being. There is also a full chapter on behavioral normative economics, which evaluates economic policies based on findings and theories of behavioral economics.