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sunnny's review against another edition
Boek had de helft korter kunnen zijn als de auteur niet zo eindeloos had verteld over aan welke onderwijsinstelling hij nu weer lesgaf en welke superbekende collega's hij wel niet had. Maar verder prima boekie.
dayne's review against another edition
4.0
You will learn a lot about how you are being tricked into making bad decisions. A good read if you want to better understand why people make the choices they make. The author is annoyingly salty about how the cool kid traditional economists don't like him.
bethreadsandnaps's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed many of the studies he discusses, including the NFL draft, as well as the new office "draft" picks. Without knowing the people he speaks of, particularly those that died, I feel the book gets bogged down at times with the back stories. Usually I'm one who enjoys the personal side of things, but in this instance it seemed unnecessary.
The older I get, the more I agree with the author that people's behavior does not correspond with economic graphs. At the same time, much behavior is predictable. An interesting field of study!
The older I get, the more I agree with the author that people's behavior does not correspond with economic graphs. At the same time, much behavior is predictable. An interesting field of study!
realreads's review against another edition
3.0
I was not a fan of the chronological format & the personal parts of the book. I understand that this was like a professional memoir but the format just wasn't my cup of tea.
The behavior econ content is of course too notch!
The behavior econ content is of course too notch!
honzaf's review against another edition
4.0
TL;DR People are not hyper-efficient optimization machines who evaluate every situation fully and always select the correct most optimal solution. People are people: flawed, biased and with limited computing capacity, which drives them to use clever mental shortcuts to deal with whatever life throws at them. Sometimes these heuristics work great, sometimes they mislead us or we fall prey to our biases.
I picked up these ideas already before reading this book, from various magazine articles, radio shows, and other books (and personal experience, ahem), so I cannot say I would learn too much new. But reading the book gave me appreciation for how new these ideas much have been when they first started popping up and challenging the traditional "economic wisdom" and how much resistance they received. Plus the anecdotes are amusing and the book is written in a very light tone. Good read.
I picked up these ideas already before reading this book, from various magazine articles, radio shows, and other books (and personal experience, ahem), so I cannot say I would learn too much new. But reading the book gave me appreciation for how new these ideas much have been when they first started popping up and challenging the traditional "economic wisdom" and how much resistance they received. Plus the anecdotes are amusing and the book is written in a very light tone. Good read.
embingham's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 really. This book had some interesting ideas in it but it also had a lot of high level discussion (rambling) that was not that interesting. I might still have enjoyed the book a lot, but there was also a lot of self-congratulatory back pats and jabs at other researchers.
kerrynicole72's review against another edition
3.0
Simultaneously fascinating and boring, I had a very hard time getting into this book. I may revisit it later when I am in a different mind space.
lynch626's review against another edition
4.0
This is a great book in which Thaler recounts the journey of his life work to discover and make popular the discipline of behavioral economics. I have studied many of the concepts before, but I do like hearing them again with research examples, and Thaler does a great job of relating to the average person. A few concepts and ideas that stood out to me:
-Value of a life: humans place a much higher value on life when people are called out individually (Jane Doe died in a tragic traffic accident last week) rather than with statistics (10,000 people in the state of NC die in traffic-related accidents each year)
-the Endowment effect: leads individuals to systematically value things they already own much more than the identical item in someone else’s hands
-Hindsight bias: past events seem to be more prominent than they appeared while they were occurring. Can lead individuals to believe an event was more predictable than it actually was, resulting in an oversimplification in cause and effect.
-overvaluing early NFL draft picks - Thaler works with several NFL teams to try to show them how they are giving up too much to get earlier picks in the NFL draft.
-company equity evaluation - the stock of one unit/division of a company should never be valued at more than the entire company combined.
One concept that I struggled with was Thaler's attempt to explain how people are more willing to gamble when it comes to losses than gains. (ie-risk/loss aversion & expected returns) He presents the following scenario in various ways throughout the book,
• Scenario 1. Give someone $400. Then offer them a choice of gaining $100, no risk, or a 50/50 chance of gaining $90/$110. People nearly always take the $100.
• Scenario 2. Give someone $600. Then tell them they have a choice between losing $100 or a 50/50 chance of losing $90/$110. People nearly always take the risk.
and argues that since the odds are exactly the same, people's reaction to the 2 scenarios SHOULD be the same. I disagree though- I think it's completely rational to want to gamble instead of taking a sure loss... after a while, I came to the realization that this is exactly what Thaler was attempting to prove though. Not all money is treated equally. I still don't quite understand that Econs think it so weird though. Money is just a placeholder for opportunity, and definitely we do not value all opportunity the same.
Anyway, this book definitely kept me thinking and I like that. Thaler also notes that a great place to go for new articles on behavioral economics is the Journal of Economic Perspectives. I will have to start skimming this periodically. https://www.aeaweb.org/jep/
Link to accompanying PDF: http://download.audible.com/product_related_docs/BK_ADBL_022796.pdf
-Value of a life: humans place a much higher value on life when people are called out individually (Jane Doe died in a tragic traffic accident last week) rather than with statistics (10,000 people in the state of NC die in traffic-related accidents each year)
-the Endowment effect: leads individuals to systematically value things they already own much more than the identical item in someone else’s hands
-Hindsight bias: past events seem to be more prominent than they appeared while they were occurring. Can lead individuals to believe an event was more predictable than it actually was, resulting in an oversimplification in cause and effect.
-overvaluing early NFL draft picks - Thaler works with several NFL teams to try to show them how they are giving up too much to get earlier picks in the NFL draft.
-company equity evaluation - the stock of one unit/division of a company should never be valued at more than the entire company combined.
One concept that I struggled with was Thaler's attempt to explain how people are more willing to gamble when it comes to losses than gains. (ie-risk/loss aversion & expected returns) He presents the following scenario in various ways throughout the book,
• Scenario 1. Give someone $400. Then offer them a choice of gaining $100, no risk, or a 50/50 chance of gaining $90/$110. People nearly always take the $100.
• Scenario 2. Give someone $600. Then tell them they have a choice between losing $100 or a 50/50 chance of losing $90/$110. People nearly always take the risk.
and argues that since the odds are exactly the same, people's reaction to the 2 scenarios SHOULD be the same. I disagree though- I think it's completely rational to want to gamble instead of taking a sure loss... after a while, I came to the realization that this is exactly what Thaler was attempting to prove though. Not all money is treated equally. I still don't quite understand that Econs think it so weird though. Money is just a placeholder for opportunity, and definitely we do not value all opportunity the same.
Anyway, this book definitely kept me thinking and I like that. Thaler also notes that a great place to go for new articles on behavioral economics is the Journal of Economic Perspectives. I will have to start skimming this periodically. https://www.aeaweb.org/jep/
Link to accompanying PDF: http://download.audible.com/product_related_docs/BK_ADBL_022796.pdf
xin_penguin's review against another edition
5.0
This book is so much fun. Think of this book as leisure reading while gaining some knowledge of behavioral economics.