By spending only a third of the time making decisions, my score rose by more than 50%. (It is not beneficial to spend time on the similar times, and even making mistakes on teh dissimilar trials is OK, if selections are made rapidly – affected by the number of points available per selection.

Is this helpful?

By the way, if you would like feedback on the door game, it was not obvious to me that I was allowed to click on an open door a second time, which skews the results if this is only discovered in the second test.

In the instructions, you might like to explain that a person can choose to either click on the same door again, or select an alternative door.

Like you I found ‘The Logic of Life’, by Tim Hartford to be a terrific book.

It is true that the two books are from opposite perspectives, but this does not mean that they are not complimentary. The Logic of Life is about the behaviors that are governed by economic forces, while Predictably Irrational is about the behaviors that are irrational. Unless you believe that al behaviors are fully and always rational (or irrational), this means that there are some cases where we behave according to economic principles and some in which we are not.

Personally, I think that the economic lens is a fantastic perspective on life, but it is not compete and we need to consider other things as well when we try to understand human nature.

Does psychology help us model only individual economic behavior or can it be (or has been) used to model mass or group behavior?

Malcolm Gladwell’s the Tipping Point, presented some interesting examples about how few key players can cause exponential following for a product or an idea. Has such behavior been modeled in economics?

thanks

Your post reminds me of an article I read recently in the LA Times in which the behavior shown in two economic studies was described as “weird and irrational”. That made me wonder about the traditional definition of rationality. Just because some decisions don’t add up in terms of real monetary value, does it mean that economic principles of utility cannot still apply? What about non-monetary utility? When I am choosing between brands of cotton balls at the pharmacy, it may not make dollar sense to buy the brand name when the near identical generic brand is much cheaper, but the utility I associate with the brand name also adds value to the decision-making process. When we figure that non-monetary utility into our utility maximization considerations, that seemingly irrational decision may be rational after all.

My day-dreaming-from-work rumination is, I suppose, that utility maximization is still relevant in analyzing “irrational” decisions, but that because of the unique nature of preferences, it can only explain decision-making on an individual basis. Describing these non-monetary behaviors in terms of psychology provides more opportunity for aggregate analysis without the need to define the util-value associated with decision factors, but there persists the issue of a difference in units of analysis. How can psychological analysis be combined with economic analysis when the units of analysis differ?

I suppose those are some of the questions that make me so curious to read your book. Hopefully my recent graduate salary will allow me to rationally purchase it once it is released!