He’s taken his time and he’s waited his turn, but Richard Thaler has delivered the definitive book on Behavioral Economics, the one you can’t afford to miss. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. 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. 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. 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.Ĭoupling 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.
More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. 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. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. 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. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans-predictable, error-prone individuals.
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