A Short Course in Behavioral Economics

Here’s a course for our historical moment….

Behavioral economics—”the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets”—is a relatively new discipline. This approach to economics, which marries psychology and economics and discards the assumption that every economic actor is rational, was developed partly by Richard Thaler, Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Now, thanks to the Edge.org, you can follow a short class on the subject. It’s taught by Thaler himself and he’s joined by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman.

The course, delivered in text and video, is being rolled out weekly on the Edge web site in six installments. You can find Weeks 1 and 2 here and here. And you can check back for new installments here (scroll to the very bottom of the page.)

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