Archive for category Economics
Given a choice between a risky decision and a safe decision, people choose differently depending on whether the payoffs are described as a gain or losses. This is known as “loss aversion”. Laurie Santos and her colleagues worked out how to give monkeys a choice that could be presented either as a gain or loss. Their choice patterns matched the behaviour of humans, as she reveals in this TED talk which really gets going after about eight minutes. It turns out that “a monkey financial advisor is just as dumb as your human financial advisor.”
Dan Pink’s talk (previously featured) and some wonderful, witty animation combine to make a short film about the psychology of motivation. This illustrates why the economic concept of incentive is problematic: it’s just not the case that more monetary incentive means that work will be done more enthusiastically. Pink comments on the success of projects such as Wikipedia which are dependent on free labour.
The above is an extract from a forty-minute talk that you can see in full without the illustration.
Would you rather have 100 pounds in 12 months’ time, or 110 pounds in 13 months’ time? Most of us would take the latter option and wait just a month longer for 10% more money.
But now, move everything forward by 12 months: would you rather have £100 right now, or wait a month for £110? Suddenly an extra month seems a long time to wait: many of us would rather take the hundred.
This is an example of what’s called a preference reversal. The choice is essentially the same, but merely by transposing the choice in time, we can affect which option people prefer. Even if £110 seems more attractive to you in both cases, there will still be a similar reversal when we fine-tune the times and amounts of money. Read the rest of this entry »
Another excellent talk from TED.com about behavioural economics (to add to those already covered on this blog). Dan Pink, a former speech writer for Al Gore, explains how a lot of business practice still relies on extrinsic motivation which is known scientifically to be counter-productive (explained previously on this blog). He echoes Phil Rozenweig’s charge that the business world is lacking in scientific critical thinking, and offers Wikipedia versus Encarta as an example of how intrinsic motivation wins out. It’s not only an engaging talk, but another nail in the coffin of the concept of incentives which is core to rational-choice economics.
Last week I gave a talk about happiness research. Here are some notes for posterity. I haven’t deliberately sought out happiness research, but bias research (my area of interest) overlaps with it a great deal.
First, a disclaimer. When we talk about one group being happier than another, we’re talking about the average of a large number of subjects. All the different life stories that arise from, say, having children, are boiled down to a single figure. I would prefer to see longitudinal studies of happiness displayed as a “heat map” rather than a line on a graph.
Second, a correction. Last week I hadn’t read Bella DePaulo’s Singled Out, which takes a close look at research on the effects of marriage. So when I said that marriage makes people happier by a wide margin, I was unaware of how much this apaprently “common-sense” finding was based on bad research which has been influenced by the “family values” lobby. Some of DePaulo’s findings: Read the rest of this entry »
Behavioural economists have been quick on the uptake in using video lectures to convey their message. Here is a short round-up focusing on quality rather than comprehensiveness.
Read the rest of this entry »
Review of Peter A. Ubel (2009) Free Market Madness: Why human nature is at odds with economics – and why it matters. Harvard Business Press, ISBN:9781422126097
Despite the title, this book sings the praises of the free market. However, it soundly debunks a libertarian free-market fundamentalism that draws its legitimacy from the rational-choice assumptions of economics.
The author is a medical doctor and decision scientist,