Behavioral Economics Quotes

• One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

  Dan Ariely

  Decision, Lessons, Environment

  "Mental depletion complicates financial decisions for the poor". Interview with Kristen Doerer, www.pbs.org. January 19, 2016.

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• January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

  Sendhil Mullainathan

  New Year, Self, Years

  "Get Some Sleep, and Wake Up the G.D.P." by Sendhil Mullainathan, www.nytimes.com. February 1, 2014.

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• The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Loss, Psychology, Aversion

  Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.341, Macmillan

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• The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.

  Richard Thaler

  People, Lessons, Economics

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• It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

  Dan Ariely

  Depressing, Confused, Smart

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• Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.

  Edward Boyden

  Decision, Economics, Process

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Psychology, Mind

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• Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

  Richard Thaler

  Retirement, Self, Saving

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• [There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Men, Decision, Study

  "Contemporary Economic Research" by Kenneth Boulding in "Trends in Social Science" edited by Donald P. Ray (pp. 9-26), 1958.

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• Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.

  Richard Thaler

  Retirement, People, Important

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

  Cass Sunstein

  Stars, War, Psychology

  "Cass Sunstein explains why Star Wars is like America". Interview with Alex McLevy, film.avclub.com. June 2, 2016.

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