ECN 319 Behavioral Economics
Why do individuals sometimes make seemingly irrational decisions? Do consumers always make choices that maximize their utility? This course capitalizes on students' basic knowledge of economic decision making to question some of the assumptions of mainstream economic models introduced in lower-level economics courses.
Discovering the drivers of decision making that appears to deviate from full rationality is a relatively new field of study that integrates insight from psychology into traditional analysis of behavior and choice. Findings from behavioral economics have wide-ranging application in the professional world, spanning economic policy making, corporate management, marketing and finance. 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.