Behavioral economics has dramatically increased the power of economic models to analyze individual and market behavior. It replaces the psychological assumptions that have traditionally held sway in economics with a more flexible, data-driven approach. In this course, we explore what recent research in behavioral economics reveals about how humans systematically deviate from rationality in our economic decision-making. We focus on cases and examples —specifically on how cultural norms, behavioral biases, and decision-making practices in the Nordic and European countries differ from the largely American data set used by the founders of the field—in order to identify promising new directions in understanding and predicting how people actually act and interact in the marketplace.
Behavioral EconomicsSemester Course
