Behav Econ & Decision Making

The purpose of this course is to inform future managers, analysts, consultants, and advisors of the psychological processes and biases underlying decision-making, with an emphasis on how to incorporate these insights into marketing and business strategies. This course will help you to improve the quality of your own judgments and decisions in both business and everyday life. People are poor intuitive statisticians, meaning that when they “just think” about situations for which some data or casual observations exist, they tend to make serious inferential errors, in turn leading to systematically biased decisions. We will study some errors that are particularly important for real world problems and look for easy-to-implement solutions.

The class has two main facets. First, it will give you a broad overview of important results from various behavioral sciences that clarify how people make decisions. Second, it will provide you with advice about applying these findings to topics in marketing, management, and finance. Classroom time will be devoted to a combination of lectures, discussions, and exercises illustrating the main concepts.