Programme Content
Consider the following: ask the person on your left the answer to the following: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 = ? To the one on your right: 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x4 x 3 x 2 x 1=? Chances are that the one on your right will quote a higher number. The reason is they are Humans, and not cold, calculating, rational machines or Econs. This course is about understanding human behavior through the lens of behavioral economics – heuristics and biases, and reference points that influence our everyday behavior.
Each topic covered in this course will have three facets. First, participants will get a broad overview of important results from behavioral economics, psychology of economic decision-making, and heuristics & biases that influence our decision-making. Second, the participants will see applications corresponding to these results in a wide range of business contexts. Third, the course will introduce the participants the idea of experimentation – the methodological tool in which one thing is changed at a time which in turn makes causal inference possible. Policies and strategies are often adopted based on intuition or feeling, which may not be a smart thing to do. Will you go to a doctor, who claims she prescribes medicines on the basis of ‘intuition’? Will you let yourself be cut by a surgeon who ‘feels’ there is something wrong with your kidney? To us the answer, quite unequivocally, is no. An informed choice can be made by rigorous empirical evidences using randomized experimental data.
