- What does it mean for a decision-maker to 'satisfice' rather than optimise, in Herbert Simon's framework?
- Why did Simon argue that the classical model of a fully rational economic actor was unrealistic?
- What informational and cognitive constraints did Simon say make true optimisation impossible for real people?
Behavioral Economics
How psychology shapes economic decision-making.
- How did the Allais paradox contribute to the foundations of behavioural economics?
- What did Dunning and Kruger find about how low-scoring test-takers rate their own performance?
- Why do top performers tend to underestimate how much better they did than others?
- What is the underlying mechanism that links competence to self-awareness of incompetence?
- How did Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky show that human decisions depart from the rational-agent model of economics?
- What is framing, and why does it change whether people perceive an outcome as a gain or a loss?
- How did Vernon Smith use laboratory experiments to test whether real markets converge on theoretically predicted prices?
- How did Ariely's team design the experiment to test whether a placebo's stated price affected its pain relief?
- How did Robert Shiller's research on asset bubbles seem to contradict Fama's findings?
- What behavioural changes has Jaroslav Flegr linked to latent Toxoplasma gondii infection?
- How did childhood exposure to natural disasters correlate with CEOs' later risk appetite?
- Why did CEOs who survived a disaster unharmed become more risk-tolerant, while those who suffered real losses became more cautious?
- What is brand personality theory, and how did researchers test its limits using rocks?
- Why did respondents attributing personality traits to rocks reveal a flaw in the measurement scale?
- What is mental accounting, and why does a windfall get spent while an equivalent wage gets saved?
- What is the endowment effect, and how does it contradict the classical model of a rational economic agent?
- How does a 'nudge' like opt-out organ donation change behavior without restricting anyone's choices?
- Why did Thaler argue that departures from rationality are systematic rather than random noise?
- How did a contract killing fee shrink as it passed through five successive subcontractors?
- Why did the final subcontractor in the chain decide to warn the intended victim instead of carrying out the job?
- What does the case demonstrate about how incentives degrade as they pass through layers of an organisation?