"Every day we make choices--about food and other purchases, financial investments, our children's health and education, even the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nudge shows how sensible "choice architecture" can help us to overcome the biases that lead to bad decisions and nudge us toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society"--

"The million-copy #1 New York Times bestseller, revised and updated with a whole new financial plan for 2018, for women who want short-term clarity and long-term security. The message of Suze Orman's phenomenal bestseller Women & Money resonates as deeply today as it did when it was first published: Why is it that women have such a complicated, dysfunctional relationship with money? With her signature mix of insight, truth-telling, and compassion, Suze hits home with advice that is at once intuitive and pragmatic. There is still no more trusted money expert than Suze Orman--and she's making a comeback with a new, streamlined 2018 financial plan and some straight-talk for these tough times, when none of us can afford to sit back and relax when it comes to our money"--

A curated collection from the most readable economics blog in the universe. Over the past decade, Levitt and Dubner freely admit that most of their posts were rubbish. But now they've gone through and picked the best of the best. You'll discover what people lie about, and why; the best way to cut gun deaths; why it might be time for a sex tax; and, yes, when to rob a bank. (Short answer: never; the ROI is terrible.)

The instant New York Times Bestseller #1 Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller Instant Washington Post Bestseller "Brims with a surprising amount of insight and practical advice." -- The Wall Street Journal Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human , unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home. Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In W hen: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing , Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married? In When , Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.

"From the bestselling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind comes an exploration of the power of selling, which each of us does every day--whether we know it or not. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. More than fifteen million people earn their keep by convincing someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales--but so do the other eight out of nine. Whether we're entrepreneurs persuading funders, employees pitching colleagues, or parents and teachers cajoling kids, we spend our days trying to move others. Today, like it or not, we're all in sales. Or as Daniel H. Pink puts it, everyone is in the "moving business." In this provocative book, Pink offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. He shows that sales, whether pushing a product or peddling an idea, isn't what it used to be. Because of powerful economic changes, the glad-handing, truth-bending form of sales is a relic. In its place is a new approach to moving people that involves three very human qualities and four surprising skills. As he did in Drive and A Whole New Mind, Pink lays out the science for his counterintuitive insights, offers vivid examples and stories, and provides readers with tools to put the ideas into action. Smart yet accessible, bold yet well argued, this is the first book on sales for people who've never read a book about sales. It will change how you see your world and transform what you do at work, at school, and at home"--

"Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber"--Amazon.

Akerlof and Shiller argue that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Based on the intuitive idea that markets both give and take away, they show how phishing affects everyone, in almost every walk of life. We spend our money up to the limit, and then worry about how to pay the next month's bills. The financial system soars, then crashes. In exploring the role of manipulation and deception, the authors explain a paradox: why, at a time when we are better off than ever before in history, all too many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation.

"Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation--how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how to value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?"--Baker & Taylor.

"Tiffany Shlain explores how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul." -- from book jacket flap.

In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people - facing the same economic circumstances - would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration - and of Identity Economics. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions - at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures - and much, much more. "Identity Economics" bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity - their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be - may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.

The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption by Gad Saad applies Darwinian principles in understanding our consumption patterns and the products of popular culture that most appeal to individuals. The first and only scholarly work to do so, this is a captivating study of the adaptive reasons behind our behaviors, cognitions, emotions, and perceptions. This lens of analysis suggests how we come to make selections such as choosing a mate, the foods we eat, the gifts that we offer, and more. It also highlights how numerous forms of dark side consumption, including pathological gambling, compulsive buying, pornographic addiction, and eating disorders, possess a Darwinian etiology. Engaging and diverse in scope, the book maps consumption phenomena onto four key Darwinian modules: survival, reproduction, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. As an interesting proposal, the author suggests that media and advertising contents exist in their particular forms because they are a reflection of our evolved human nature - negating the notion that they exist through the reverse causal link, as proposed by social constructivists. The link between evolutionary theory and consumption behaviors is detailed throughout the book via an examination of (among many others): appearance-enhancing products and services; financial and physical risk-taking; use of sexual imagery and the depictions of women in advertising; and television programs, movies, songs, music videos, literature, religion, and art. The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption will appeal to evolutionists who desire to explore new areas wherein evolutionary theory can be applied; consumer and marketing scholars who wish to learn about the ways in which biological-and evolutionary-based theorizing can be infused into the consumer behavior/marketing/advertising disciplines; as well as other interdisciplinary scholars interested in gaining knowledge about the power of evolutionary theory in explaining a wide range of behavioral phenomena.

This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride into the inner world of sports. Through the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they reveal the hidden influences and surprising cues that inspire and derail us—on the field and in the stands—and by extension, in corporate board rooms, office settings, and our daily lives. In this irresistible narrative romp, Wertheim and Sommers usher us from professional football to the NBA to Grand Slam tennis, from the psychology of athletes self-handicapping their performance in the boxing ring or the World Series, to an explanation of why even the glimpse of a finish line can lift us beyond ordinary physical limits. They explore why Tom Brady and other starting NFL quarterbacks all seem to look like fashion models; why fans of teams like the Cubs, Mets, and any franchise from Cleveland love rooting for a loser; why the best players make the worst coaches; why hockey goons (and fans) would rather fight at home than on the road; and why the arena t-shirt cannon has something to teach us about human nature. In short, this book is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into how psychology and behavioral science collide with the universe of wins-and-losses, coaching changes, underdogs, and rivalry games. — Boston Globe, Best Books of 2016, Sports

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction marker envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors that populate financial theories. These market anomalies have spawned a new approach to finance, one which as editor Richard Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Advances in Behavioral Finance collects together twenty-one percent articles that illustrate the power of this approach. More than just an assembly of exceptions to mainline theory, these papers illustrate how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. To take several examples, Werner De Bondt and Thaler find an explanation for superior price performance of firms with poor recent earnings histories in the tendencies of investors to overreact to recent information. Richard Roll traces the negative effects of corporate takeovers on the stock prices of the acquiring firms to the overconfidence of managers, who fail to recognize the contributions of chance to their past successes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny show how the difficulty of establishing a reliable reputation for correctly assessing the value of long term capital projects can lead investment analysts, and hence corporate managers, to focus myopically on short term returns. The analyses in this wide-ranging collection demonstrate the growing success of behavioral approaches to understanding the behavior of financial markets. As a testing ground for assessing the empirical accuracy of behavioral theories, these successful studies of the stock market reach beyond the world of finance to suggest, very powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. Advances in Behavioral Finance is a solid beachhead for behavioral work in the financial arena and a clear promise of wider application for behavioral economics in the future

A leading political and business thinker identifies the greatest threat to our economic future: the things we think we know--but don't. In the face of global competition and rapid technological change, our economy is facing its most severe test in nearly a century. Yet our leaders have failed to prepare us for what lies ahead because they are in the grip of a set of "dead ideas" about how a modern economy should work. These ways of thinking--dubious at best and often dead wrong--are on a collision course with irreversible economic developments. Here, Matt Miller offers a blend of business-world acumen and public-policy vision to lay bare how this conventional wisdom holds our country back, and he introduces us to a new way of thinking--what he calls "tomorrow's destined ideas"--that can reinvigorate our economy, our politics, and our day-to-day lives. --From publisher description.

Claims unconscious desire plays a constitutive role in global political economy. This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal-the site of unconscious desire-plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."