Human Behavior

Author Supritha Rajan argues that self-interested competition may be the official line, but it’s far from the whole story

Economics is often thought of as emotion-less, but Daniel Benjamin argues for happiness as a vital indicator

To understand behavior and choice, we need to borrow from not just cognitive science but also sociology.

Asset markets are indispensable in harnessing society’s diverse views and insights about future business performance. But those views are shaped as much by emotion and crowd mentality as by rational expectations.

If standard economic theory can’t explain a traffic jam, how can it cope with crises?

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

A transition from the conventional policy of “redistributing income” to “redistributing membership”, could promote economic integration across communities and intergenerational mobility.

Xavier Gabaix argues that public policies should prioritize alleviating deprivation at the bottom over narrowing the rich-poor gap 

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

The human brain relies on three devices for its decisions: emotion controls; addictive learning; and intellectual processing. Understanding the conditions under which the three devices are engaged is essential for conscious decision-making.

At the heart of economics is a theory of action. It reflects views about how human beings make economic decisions and leads to an analysis of aggregate consequences.

Neoclassical economics has abolished the role of psychology in decision making by assuming that all individuals are rational optimizers with rational expectations about future events.

In “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” which is my contribution to L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and originally published in French in 1978, I attempt to apply mimetic theory to modern economics and to economicphenomena, and also to explain why economic issues and economics as a discipline occupy such an important place in the modern world.