Results tagged “behavioraleconomics”

Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert.

His studies show that people clearly make irrational mistakes, thus thwarting the expectations of standard economists and turning them into crabby people with shriveled souls. Yet, because we make them over and over again, we are, as his book title has it, Predictably Irrational. Our irrational behaviors have structural origins, Ariely says, comparing the situation to our eyesight. We may know that a change in color is an optical illusion, but we can't think our way out of seeing the mistake. Same with our regularly-programmed screw-ups.