As Mr. Bott and I discussed in a meeting on Tuesday (2/11/20), I need to come up with a new theory or claim regarding Behavioral Economics for the upcoming months before the June symposium. I’ll be doing this by going beyond Thinking, Fast and Slow and trying to read more specific academic papers on particular questions or interests. In this post are three questions that could serve this purpose:
1) How relevant is the sense of freedom when making a choice? —> Would it be “better” to have this liberty than someone telling you to make the best choice derived from the ideas in Thinking, Fast and Slow?
2) Where is (if there is one) the cutoff line for applying Behavioral Economics in everyday life? If everyone was able to be more rational, would that come at the expense of others instead? Therefore, is it actually better overall that we don’t maximize our utility even if we know we can?
3) Is there a way to objectively quantify how much an individual is losing out on by not “thinking more like an econ” and being more rational? For example, are there prompts you could ask someone in a hypothetical situation and compare it to their current behavior, thereby creating a scale of how much they’re losing out on?
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