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Behavioral Economics Basics
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Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. For example, an investor only paying attention to news that supports their belief that a stock will rise, ignoring any negative indicators.
Self-Control Bias
Self-control bias is the tendency to favor immediate gratification over longer-term interests. For instance, someone might overeat or splurge on unnecessary items even when they’re trying to save money or lose weight.
Salience
Salience is the quality of being particularly noticeable or important; it is the state or condition by which something stands out relative to its neighbors. An example would be a consumer being more likely to buy a product with a brightly colored package than a more subdued but perhaps better-quality alternative.
Optimism Bias
Optimism bias is a cognitive bias that causes a person to believe that they are less likely to experience a negative event compared to others. For example, people may underestimate their own chances of getting a disease, like smoking causing lung cancer.
Time Consistency
Time consistency relates to the change in preferences over time, such that what is preferred at one time is not preferred at a different time. This can be seen when someone commits to a healthy diet in the future but chooses an unhealthy meal today.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is when individuals continue an endeavor based on the time and resources already invested, rather than the current costs and benefits. For example, people may keep waiting in line for an attraction because of the time they have already spent waiting, ignoring the current estimated waiting time.
Negativity Bias
Negativity bias is the phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to, and give more weight to, negative rather than positive experiences or information. For example, a person might dwell more on a single negative comment rather than a multitude of positive comments.
Loss Aversion
Loss aversion is a principle that suggests people experience losses more intensely than gains, and therefore work harder to avoid losses than to achieve gains. An example is when individuals refuse to sell losing stock for the hope of breaking even, thereby potentially incurring larger losses.
Bounded Rationality
Bounded rationality is the concept that decision-making is limited by the information available, the cognitive limitations of the mind, and the time available to make the decision. Consumers may buy a sub-optimal computer because they do not have the time or expertise to make the optimal choice.
Affect Heuristic
The affect heuristic is a type of mental shortcut in which current emotions—favorable or unfavorable—substantially influence the decision-making process. For example, a person feeling happy is more likely to judge risks as lower and benefits as higher.
Default Effect
The default effect is a type of cognitive bias where individuals are more likely to choose an option if it is the default option. One example is the increased enrollment in organ donation programs when registration is the default choice as opposed to requiring a proactive opt-in.
Overconfidence
Overconfidence refers to the well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. For example, an investor overestimating their ability to pick stocks is a manifestation of overconfidence.
Paradox of Choice
The paradox of choice refers to the notion that while a wide selection of choices is attractive initially, it can lead to stress and unhappiness due to the burden of deciding. A typical example is a consumer becoming overwhelmed while attempting to choose the 'best' product among similar items in a large supermarket.
Anchoring
Anchoring refers to the cognitive bias where an individual relies too heavily on an initial piece of information when making decisions. For example, the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher than what the car is worth.
Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. For instance, after seeing news reports about airplane accidents, a person might overestimate the risk of air travel despite it being statistically safer than car travel.
Mental Accounting
Mental accounting is the tendency for people to separate their money into different accounts based on subjective criteria like the source of the money or its intended use. An example is treating a 50 earned from work.
Choice Overload
Choice overload occurs when the presence of too many choices leads to sub-optimal decision making. For example, consumers may be less likely to purchase when offered a large array of products due to the difficulty in processing all the available information.
Herd Behavior
Herd behavior describes the tendency for individuals to mimic the actions of a larger group, either rationally or irrationally. A common example is when investors follow what they perceive everyone else is doing rather than making their own independent analysis.
Base Rate Neglect
Base rate neglect occurs when people ignore the base rate (general prevalence) of an event when assessing the likelihood of that event. For example, thinking a person is more likely to be a librarian than a farmer because they are shy, despite the number of farmers being greater than the number of librarians.
Hindsight Bias
Hindsight bias is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see it as having been predictable, despite there having been little to no objective basis for predicting it. An example is after an election result, saying 'I knew that was going to happen,' despite not having predicted it before.
Representativeness Heuristic
The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. For example, assuming a tall, slender person is a basketball player because they fit the stereotype, without considering the actual probability.
Illusion of Control
The illusion of control is the tendency for individuals to believe they can control or influence outcomes that they clearly have no influence over. An example is gamblers who think they can influence the roll of a dice by throwing it a certain way.
Prospect Theory
Prospect theory describes how people choose between probabilistic alternatives that involve risk, where the probabilities of outcomes are known. An example is when faced with two equal choices, one with a potential loss and the other with a potential gain, people tend to choose the one with the gain.
Decoy Effect
The decoy effect is a phenomenon in consumer behavior where a third option is introduced to influence the choice between the two original options. An example is the introduction of a large popcorn size at a very high price which makes the medium size seem more reasonable, increasing its sales.
Status Quo Bias
Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. People tend to order the same dish at a restaurant rather than trying a new dish.
Nudge Theory
Nudge theory suggests that indirect suggestions and positive reinforcements can influence the motives, incentives, and decision-making of groups and individuals. For example, placing healthier foods at eye level in a supermarket to nudge customers towards making better food choices.
Framing Effect
The framing effect is the bias where people react differently to a particular choice depending on whether it is presented as a loss or as a gain. For instance, more people would opt for surgery if told that it has a 90% survival chance than they would if told there is a 10% mortality rate.
Endowment Effect
The endowment effect describes a circumstance in which an individual values an owned object higher than its market value. For example, a person might be unwilling to sell a mug they received as a gift for 2 to buy it.
Hyperbolic Discounting
Hyperbolic discounting occurs when the value of future rewards is perceived to diminish more when they are temporally remote in a non-linear fashion. For instance, a person might choose to receive 100 in a year, but would not choose 100 in six years.
Ego Depletion
Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control and willpower draw upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired. An example is a shopper who is more likely to make impulse purchases after a stressful day at work.
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