Great news for Behavioural Economists with Richard Thaler winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017. Below is an interview with Richard Thaler on the PBS NewsHour – Making Sense by Paul Solman to launch his then new book “Misbehaving”. Notice that the book is 30% off in the Chicago Booth Bookstore. As Thaler says people love deals and can be driven to purchase things that they don’t really want if the deal is good enough. He explains the concept of sunk costs, time and money already spent with some Cameroonian students. Also the way most people value their time.
Richard Thaler, also the co-author of the book “Nudge” , has suggested that economics has always been about behaviour. Adam Smith’s first book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is in fact a Behavioural Economics treatise and within it Smith talks about its contribution to both psychology and ethics. Its purpose is to find a rationale for ethical judgement in human psychology. The latter is found in human nature: a human being put in a certain situation has a tendency to react in a certain way eg. includes sympathy, feelings and approval by others. It was Smith’s belief that human behaviour was impacted by emotions such as fear and anger and drives such as hunger. However according to Smith these emotions and drives were checked by an “impartial spectator”.
The impartial spectator allows one to see one’s own feelings and the pulls of immediate gratification from the perspective of an external observer.
In the domain of self-control and self-governance, the impartial spectator takes the structure of a long-term interest – “I won’t have that rich cream cake at morning tea because I can see that I will feel guilty about it later”. In the area of social interaction, the impartial spectator allows us to see things from another’s perspective rather than to be blinded by our own needs. The dissention is especially significant when you consider savings decisions – savings is a precision choice to delay immediate indulgence for a long-term interest. So we have the conflict between the voice of a short-term pull versus the voice of the impartial spectator.
Only recently has the field of economics advanced enough to have the tools to reincorporate the factors that Smith had always felt were important in human interaction: our caring about each other and about fairness, our difficulties with aligning our long-term interests with short-term pulls, etc. One of the most unexplored areas, which we are only now beginning to be able to measure, is the degree to which people are motivated by reputation and social status, something Smith thought was a crucial motivation for economic activity.
Nudge
The essence of behavioural economics stems from a concern that rational behaviour driven by self-interest will not guide many of us to health, wealth and happiness. People tend to make bad decisions whether it is not saving or eating the wrong type of food. This disturbing state of affairs arises because homo economicus tends to be in a continuous condition of information overload, and consumer makes errors because of their unfamiliarity about options and their effect. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue in ‘Nudge’ that subtle changes can influence peoples decision so that they can make choices that will improve their well-being. However, consumers use various methods in deciding their optimal consumption as the cost (time and effort) of acquiring all the information about the benefits of product/service might outweigh the benefits of consuming it.
Homo Economicus – the basis for a majority of economic models is the assumption that all human beings are rational and will always attempt to maximize their utility – whether it be from monetary or non-monetary gains
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