A blog about cognitive and behavioural economics. Building mathematical models of how psychology influences economic systems.
Some colleagues at Irrational Agency and I have recently been working on a framework around advice, and a key dilemma: Those who know less about finance, are more in need of advice But those who know less about finance, are less likely to realise they need advice In some ways this is another form of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. But there's an interesting additional twist. Because advice is an…
My new paper, coauthored with Yohan John , Dakota McCoy and Oliver Braganza , is out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. " Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics and peacock tails " is about the universal emergence of proxy failure. When you measure and incentivise performance by a single metric (a proxy), the proxy will always become a worse measure of performance than it was before you added the…
There are plenty of claims of US election fraud floating around this week. Most of them fall into three categories: Too vague to be meaningfully evaluated or investigated Too small to matter (a few individual ballots being challenged here and there, possibly valid but not enough to affect the results) Too wild to stand up to any kind of scrutiny Together, these claims are certainly problematic:…
Behavioral Scientist have put together their favourite predictions, ideas, worries and challenges in the field of behavioral science for the next decade. We were delighted they accepted our pitch on cogitive economics as one of the new oppportunities in the future! Here is our prediction for the future - what is yours? "The twenty-first century is pushing us toward an ever more digital,…
For those interested in a bit more background to my Times article today , here are some details on how Cummings's topics have showed up in my cognitive economics research. You can judge for yourself if I have spotted what he is working towards. Starting with Judea Pearl's modelling of causality. Pearl developed a way of using graphs (a kind of diagram showing a network of relationships between…
Since last year I have been discussing the idea of "System 3" - a set of mental capabilities and processes involved in imagination and mental simulation. These capabilities appear to be used for several mental activities, notably: planning and thinking about the future counterfactual reasoning daydreaming and mind-wandering consumption of fiction mental replay of past experiences and in…
Rory Sutherland's new book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense continues his 10-year campaign against the traditional, logical pursuit of business advantage, through a scientific lens that includes several cognitive economics themes. As ever, a curated series of amusing anecdotes about people or companies who took an unusual angle on marketing or product invention, fuel a…
Below is an article by Leigh published in INsights magazine. The magazine published by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association. See the article in its full glory here or just the text below. Behavioral pricing has been used for many years but is essentially based on changing customers' behavior without creating new value. Cognitive pricing is a new paradigm in which the customer's…
What's happening inside your head right now? What thoughts, feelings, ideas are spinning around in there? Are they important to you? If you were not able to think those thoughts, would you care? How much does your internal mental experience matter to you? To an economist: not at all. Traditional economics explicitly rules out any consideration of how people think, and what is going on in their…
It probably has not escaped your notice that the Game of Thrones TV series finished this week. If you use social media at all, I suspect you also saw some anguished squawks about how awful the ending was. How the incompetent writers screwed it all up. Maybe you even signed the petition, along with 1.5 million others, to have the last series remade with a different conclusion. Personally I thought…
If conventional economic theory is so wrong (as we are repeatedly told ) why does it survive so well? This post by UnlearningEcon prompted me to think again about why economics, despite widely accepted empirical data from behavioural econ, is broadly taught in the same way as before, and why its basic assumptions still underpin much modern research. Some have a sociological explanation for this.…
[ Tara posting today ] We had a great response to our Cognitive Economics session at the American Economic Association’s conference a few weeks ago. For those who weren’t there, here’s a quick summary of the four papers presented, and the discussion at the end. Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball presented What Do People Want ? The key question of this paper is: how can we…
Alex Rosenberg says here that we are instinctively driven by stories, narrative and theory of mind - a very useful instinct on the small scale - although that instinct can be misleading on the larger scale of history and politics. His book on this claim is also out, though I haven't read it yet. It seems uncontroversial that the idea of narrative has a powerful hold on how we think. There are…
For the first time, there will be a session on Cognitive Economics at the American Economic Association’s conference. The conference, in association with the ASSA, is taking place from Friday 4 January to Sunday 6 January and will be a hugely interesting programme over the long weekend. The Cognitive Economics session will take place on Sunday 6 January 2019 at 8-10am in Atlanta Marriott Marquis,…
“Mysterious psycho-logic”, the “Nudge Unit” and irrational humans - Leigh explores cognitive and behavioural economics and science with Rory Sutherland on BBC Radio 4’s show Thought Cages today and on Friday. Tune in at 13:45 today to hear Leigh discussing behavioural and cognitive economics on Thought Cage’s next episode: Instinct Before Logic: The Postbox at the O2 . During this episode, Rory…
Hello, today it’s not Leigh posting, but me, Tara, his new colleague! I’ve recently started working for Inon and with Leigh on his cognitive economics work. I’ll be writing content on cognitive economics, spreading the word about cognitive economics to both academic and general audiences and also organising events around cognitive economics. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself…
Spending today and tomorrow attending the Rebuilding Macroeconomics conference at the Treasury. The programme looks very interesting - highlights include: Ekaterina Svetlova's opening talk on "Imagining the Future", which I think will be quite relevant to System 3 and an idea I have been working on, prospective expectations: the concept that actors based their decisions not on a Nash equilibrium…
In my last post I outlined the concept of System 3, what it is and why it matters. In short, System 3 is the mental ability to imagine the future and evaluate how happy you will be in it – based on how pleasurable the process of imagining itself is. A lot of different research strands have come together to result in the identification of System 3 as a distinct mental process. I summarise the key…
In recent years we’ve become used to thinking about decisions as “system 1” or “system 2”. System 1 choices are automatic decisions, made without thinking, based on an immediate emotional or sensory reaction. System 2 is used to stop and rationally calculate the consequences of our choices, and determine the best cost-benefit tradeoff. But these two processes don’t capture every decision. Indeed…
There are few truly universal books on behavioural science: like most of the others, this one has a particular reader in mind. Richard's reader works in advertising, and it must be a rare advertising executive who still hasn't heard of behavioural economics. Richard therefore heads straight into the meat of the book with little beating around the rational-agent bush. A couple of connected…
I’m visiting the American Economics Association conference in Philadelphia this weekend and looking forward to catching up with the latest in theoretical and empirical research. Behavioural economics has received another endorsement this year with Richard Thaler’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. The behavioural field still has only a small minority of the conference’s papers, but many more than a few…
[ An essay written for the Internet Review , a one-off maybe-to-become-annual publication documenting (and celebrating?) Internet trends ] Every human has two minds: one like an amoeba and one like a squirrel. The amoeba mind is reactive, emotional, intuitive. It decides immediately, without planning or consideration. It is Freud’s “id”, or the System One of behavioral economics: the amoeba is…
I recently gave a talk at TEDxCoventGardenWomen about an economic agent-based modelling system I have built (readers of Thomas Schelling may see some influence). In the talk I use this system to analyse ideas around privilege, prejudice and systemic inequality - and to test some policies that might help to solve the persistent gender and racial pay gaps that we still see in most societies. The…
The much-delayed final episode in a short series of posts - part 1 and part 2 here. Lassie died one night. As Thomas Schelling* pointed out in a thought-provoking 1982 essay, millions of people watched it happen on television one Sunday evening, and cried. Yet they all knew Lassie was not real – and that the dog who played her was probably in perfect health. Why did they experience the same…
I had this piece drafted before the murder of Jo Cox last week. But I don’t think it changes anything I was going to say. It simply makes it more urgent to say it. May I introduce you to my two lovely young nieces? Natasha is four months old and Rosalind four years. They live in rural Devon, and they’re just starting to discover the world and decide how to feel about it. I want to think a little…