The first and only encyclopedia to focus on the economic and financial behaviors of consumers, investors, and organizations, including an exploration of how people make good—and bad—economic decisions. Traditional economic theories speculate how and when people should spend money. But consumers don't always behave as expected and often adopt strategies that might appear unorthodox yet are, at times, more effective than the rule prescribed by conventional wisdom. This groundbreaking text examines the ways in which people make financial decisions, whether it is because they are smart but atypical in their choices ... or just irrational decision makers. A leading authority on behavioral economics, Morris Altman and more than 150 expert contributors delve into key concepts in behavioral economics, economic psychology, behavioral finance, neuroeconomics, experimental economics, and institutional economics to help inform economic models based on reality, not theory. Through 250 informative entries, the book explores various aspects of the subject including decision making, economic analysis, and public policy. In addition to introducing concepts to readers new to the subject, the book sheds light on more advanced financial topics in a manner that is objective, comprehensive, and accessible.

A brand new collection of state-of-the-art tools for making better business decisions… 4 authoritative books bring together hundreds of bite-size, easy-to-use techniques for optimizing every business decision, choice, interaction, and negotiation! Your decisions drive your business performance and determine your career success. Whether you’re collaborating, leading, negotiating, or persuading, those decisions must be consistently sharp – and this 4 book collection will help you sharpen every decision you make. Start with Robert Gunther’s The Truth About Making Smart Decisions: 50 powerful bite-size “truths” about making better real-world decisions when it matters most. Gunther shows how to systematically prepare to make better decisions... get the right information, without getting buried in useless data... minimize risks and then act decisively... handle emotions... make better group decisions... profit from mistakes... and much more. Next, William S. Kane focuses on the decision to change – and to lead change. In The Truth About Thriving in Change, Kane shares 49 powerful decision-making “truths” about change leadership: which skills you need most, and how to develop them... how to lead change without eroding commitment or productivity... why you must start fast, and “run before you walk”... when to persuade, when to educate, and when to “use force”... how to create the right cultural framework for successful change, and more. Next, Leigh Thompson’s The Truth About Negotiations helps you optimize every decision associated with successful negotiations. Thompson provides realistic game plans that work in any scenario, showing how to create win-win deals by leveraging carefully collected information. Learn how to prepare quickly and efficiently… handle imperfect negotiating situations… establish trust with someone you don’t yet trust… recognize when to walk away. Thompson guides through planning strategy, identifying your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” making the right first offer to control the process, resolving difficult disputes, and achieving the goals that matter most. Finally, in The Truth About Getting the Best From People, Second Edition, Martha Finney turns to day-to-day management decision-making, offering 60+ powerful techniques -- including new ways to persuade, manage virtual teams, overcome unconscious decision-making biases, and identify/cultivate high performers. These four books offer definitive, evidence-based principles for optimizing your decision-making throughout your entire management career! From world-renowned decision-making experts Robert E. Gunther, William S. Kane, Leigh Thompson, and Martha I. Finney

Researchers studying decision making have traditionally studied the phenomenon in the laboratory, with hypothetical decisions that may or may not involve the decision maker's values, passions, or areas of expertise. The assumption is that the findings of these well-controlled laboratory studies will shed light on the important decisions people make in their everyday lives. This book examines that assumption. The volume begins by covering four basic phases of decision making: setting or clarifying goals, gathering information, structuring the decision, and making a final choice. Comprehensive reviews of existing literature on each of these topics is provided. Next, the author examines differences in decision making as a function of several factors not typically discussed in the literature: the type of decision being made (e.g., legal, medical, moral) and the existence of individual differences in the decision maker (developmental differences, individual differences in style or temperament, differences as a function of expertise). The author then examines the topic of group decision making, contrasting it with individual decision making. The volume concludes with some observations and suggestions for improving peoples' everyday decision making. This book is intended for use as a core textbook or supplement for courses in psychology, education, or allied disciplines. It will also be an invaluable resource for people who work with people making decisions in various applied settings, such as schools, universities, and health care centers.

Statistical illiteracy can have an enormously negative impact on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader understanding and sound decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions under uncertainty, explaining why these are very often more rational than probability models. After a critical look at behavioral theories that do not model actual psychological processes, the book concludes with a call for a heuristic revolution that will enable us to understand the ecological rationality of both statistics and heuristics, and bring a dose of sanity to the study of rationality.

Statistical illiteracy can have an enormously negative impact on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader understanding and sound decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions under uncertainty, explaining why these are very often more rational than probability models. After a critical look at behavioral theories that do not model actual psychological processes, the book concludes with a call for a "heuristic revolution" that will enable us to understand the ecological rationality of both statistics and heuristics, and bring a dose of sanity to the study of rationality.

Decision making arises when we wish to select the best possible course of action from a set of alternatives. With advancements of the digital technologies, it is easy, and almost instantaneous, to gather a large volume of information and/or data pertaining to a problem that we want to solve. For instance, the world-wi- web is perhaps the primary source of information and/or data that we often turn to when we face a decision making problem. However, the information and/or data that we obtain from the real world often are complex, and comprise various kinds of noise. Besides, real-world information and/or data often are incomplete and ambiguous, owing to uncertainties of the environments. All these make decision making a challenging task. To cope with the challenges of decision making, - searchers have designed and developed a variety of decision support systems to provide assistance in human decision making processes. The main aim of this book is to provide a small collection of techniques stemmed from artificial intelligence, as well as other complementary methodo- gies, that are useful for the design and development of intelligent decision support systems. Application examples of how these intelligent decision support systems can be utilized to help tackle a variety of real-world problems in different - mains, e. g. business, management, manufacturing, transportation and food ind- tries, and biomedicine, are also presented. A total of twenty chapters, which can be broadly divided into two parts, i. e.

Have you ever experienced a decision situation that was hard to come to grips with? Did you ever feel a need to improve your decision-making skills? Is this something where you feel that you have not learned enough practical and useful methods? In that case, you are not alone! Even though decision-making is both considered and actually also is a very important skill in modern work-life as well as in private life, these skills are not to any reasonable extent taught in schools at any level. No wonder many people do indeed feel the need to improve but have a hard time finding out how. This book is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming of our educational systems and possibly also of our common, partly intuition-based, decision culture. Intuition is not at all bad, quite the contrary, but it has to co-exist with rationality. We will show you how. Methods for decision-making should be of prime concern to any individual or organisation, even if the decision processes are not always explicitly or even consciously formulated. All kinds of organisations, as well as individuals, must continuously make decisions of the most varied nature in order to prosper and attain their objectives. A large part of the time spent in any organisation, not least at management levels, is spent gathering, processing, and compiling information for the purpose of making decisions supported by that information. The same interest has hitherto not been shown for individual decision-making, even though large gains would also be obtained at a personal level if important personal decisions were better deliberated. This book aims at changing that and thus attends to both categories of decision-makers. This book will take you through a journey starting with some history of decision-making and analysis and then go through easy-to-learn ways of structuring decision information and methods for analysing the decision situations, beginning with simple decision situations and then moving on to progressively harder ones, but never losing sight of the overarching goal that the reader should be able to follow the progression and being able to carry out similar decision analyses in real-life situations. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by Stockholm University DSV