This week’s posts were going to be about podcasts that I listen to, but I’ll push that out to next week.
I and a colleague of mine at the Gokhale Institute (which is where I work) are running a five day seminar at the Institute on behavioral economics. This one is for undergraduate students only, but based on how this one turns out, we might do a couple more through the year. But for that reason, I figured we might take a look at behavioral economics is, and explore work being done in this area, and why it matters.
In this post, I’ll give you an overview of behavioral economics, and in the five subsequent posts that follow, I’ll detail what we spoke about in each session.
First things first: behavioral economics really is a tautology, because economics is the study of choice, and we make our choices given what we know and given what we feel.
The trouble is, modern economic theory (most, but not all of it) would tend to say that what we feel ought not to matter, and in fact doesn’t actually matter in the real world. Except we’ve all demolished a big fat bowl of ice-cream because we’re feeling blue, the diet be damned. We’ve all bought items on sale on Amazon, when we clearly had no need for them. And we’ve all chosen to play a game on the phone over completing a task at hand, and hang the consequences. I could go on (and not just where individuals are concerned, but firms and governments too!), but you get the picture.
We’re all predictably irrational.
In a sense, behavioral economics is about the first word in that link. As a social scientist, it’s not much use to say that we’re irrational. That’s akin to saying that there’s nothing that we can say, do or predict about the choices that all of us make.
But predictably irrational? Ah, how exactly? If our irrationality can actually be modeled, then perhaps we could understand how and why we make the choices we do. Even better, maybe we could push people towards eating more salads and less ice-cream. Although you should note that there are some people in my tribe who don’t necessarily think this to be a good idea.
Still, the study of
a) whether we think “rationally” or not, and…
b) if not, then can we think systematically about how we are “irrational” and why…
c) and can we use our findings from this exercise to make people, institutions and therefore societies behave differently (and hopefully better)…
…is the study of behavioral economics.
And the five day version (duly expanded) of this is what Savita Kulkarni and I will be talking about at Gokhale Institute over the course of the next five days. And I’ll keep you guys updated as we go along.
EconForEverybody 