BUS 143 Behavioral Science for Decision Making
Why do individuals sometimes make seemingly irrational decisions? Do consumers always make choices that maximize their utility? By introducing students to some basic but intriguing components of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, this course seeks to answer these questions and numerous others.
Discovering the drivers of irrational decision making is a relatively new field of study that integrates insight from psychology, sociology and neuroscience into traditional analysis of behavior and choice. Findings from behavioral economics have found application across a wide range of disciplines, including marketing and management. The analytical approach in this field breaks from the long-standing mainstream economics tradition of treating subjects as rational agents, effectively making use of available information to make rational decisions with the goal of maximizing personal utility. Analysis in the context of behavioral economics alters this approach by integrating biases, heuristic reasoning and social norms into models of human behavior with the scope of increasing explanatory and predictive power of theory.