Tyler Cowen’s “An Economist Gets Lunch” is pretty self-indulgent. In this book we get food lessons from an economist. Self-Indulgence Firstly, Cowen really loves his food and is happy to share his enthusiasm for high-quality meals. The second sense of self-indulgence is of an academic doing what he loves. I don’t mean to imply this negatively. When people do…
Category: Decision Making
Improving Public Policy With Better Assumptions
Katie Chen (then at Western), Dilip Soman (of Rotman), and myself published a whitepaper. (I wrote this in 2017 and have edited since). This was through BEAR at the University of Toronto. We discussed moves towards improving public policy with better assumptions. Specifically the ideas about human behavior used in models. (More empiricially valid models in academic terms). By…
Star Wars, The US Constitution, And The Dangers Of Not Rewriting When Necessary
Cass Sunstein’s book — The World According to Star Wars — is a must for Star Wars fans who are also interested in behavioral economics/law/public policy. This is probably a surprisingly big intersection. What do we find out about Star Wars and the US constitution? Star Wars: Why? I must confess to not seeing the appeal of…
Behavioural Insights, Policy Policy, and the OECD
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have a fascinating new initiative. (I wrote this in in 2017 and just edited since). “Behavioral Insights and Public Policy: Lessons from Round the World.” The book which accompanies the initiative has extensive case studies. The case studies outline how behavioral insights have been deployed. This has advanced…
Field Guide to Lies
Daniel Levitin has an very enjoyable and informative popular science book in his Field Guide to Lies. He surveys how we know what we know, and how we communicate it to others. To be fair not all of it is about lies, for instance, he discusses how data is collected. A lot of the problems he…
Improving Public Policy Through Testing
David Halpern is an interesting character. Originally an advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government he went on to establish the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights for David Cameron’s Conservative government. His CV makes sense to me given what he specializes in. His aim is to make government policy better. The politicians decide what should be done and Halpern tries to ensure it…
Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More?
One puzzle for academics, myself included, is why businesses don’t experiment more? Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More? Experiments have great potential to improve business outcomes. Often businesses don’t seem to do much experimenting. Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus…
Causation And The Post Hoc Fallacy
Today’s post looks at causation and the post hoc fallacy. Types Of Fallacy There are generally two types of fallacy. The first is nice and clean. These are formal fallacies. These are clearly wrong by the rules of logic. The classic is the well-known fallacy that: If p then q, does not mean that if q…
Motivation For The New Year
Let us start the new year thinking about how motivation works. What encourages us to action? How can knowledge help us with motivation for the new year’s resolutions? Simple Views Of Motivation Dan Ariely has a new book on this topic. And to motivate you to read it I’ll say it is a very short book. Ariely…
How Long Will We Be Unhappy?
A fascinating line of research tackles the problem of affective forecasting. Such forecasting involves questions such as: How Long Will We Be Unhappy? Affective Forecasting This area of research studies our predictions of how we will feel when events happen. We typically aren’t very good at affective forecasting. .. expectations are often important and often wrong. They are important…
