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The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and The Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life
Uri Gneezy, John List · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages
*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
Tobias J. Moskowitz, L. Jon Wertheim · 278 pages
In Scorecasting, University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports, and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football, and hockey games are played, won and lost. Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economi
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir · 304 pages
An examination of how scarcity--and our flawed responses to it--shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 546 pages
"The acclaimed author of the influential bestseller The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb takes a next big step with a deceptively simple concept: the "antifragile." Like the Greek hydra that grows two heads for each one it loses, people, systems, and institutions that are antifragile not only withstand shocks, they benefit from them. In a modern world dominated by chaos and uncertainty, Antifragi
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller · 230 pages
An argument for recovering Keynes' notion of animal spirits as a contributor to economic phenomena, with examples drawn from the economic crises of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein · 312 pages
Thaler and Sunstein develop libertarian paternalism as a middle path between command-and-control and strict-neutrality choice architectures. Libertarian paternalism protects humans against their damaging psychological traits (inertia, bounded rationality, undue influence) by exploiting those habits to nudge people into making better choices.
Happiness: Lessons From A New Science
Richard Layard · 320 pages
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Dan Ariely · 334 pages
How can confusing directions actually help us? Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive? Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy? In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he expos
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
William Poundstone · 336 pages
Examines how "price consultants" and retailers convince consumers to pay more for less, and how negotiation coaches offer similar advice for businesspeople cutting deals Prices are a collective hallucination. Here, author William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of value. In psychological experiments, people are unable to estimate "fair" prices accurately and are strongly influenced by th
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell · 320 pages
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their
Irrational Exuberance
Robert J. Shiller · 311 pages
"In this update of his 2000 bestseller, Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller returns to the topic that gained him international fame: market volatility. Shiller breaks new ground in this second edition by laying out in even clearer and starker terms the market excess that continue to destabilize the economy and disrupt our lives." "Building on the original edition, Shiller draws out the psycholog
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Richard H. Thaler · 432 pages
Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans―predictable, error-prone individuals. *Misbehaving* is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth―and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assume
Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes
Paula Szuchman, Jenny Anderson · 342 pages
Marriage is a mysterious, often irrational business. Making it work till death do you part--or just till the end of the week--isn't always easy. And no one ever handed you a user's manual. Until now. Here, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson offer something new: a clear-eyed, rational route to demystifying your disagreements and improving your relationship. The key, they propose, is to think like an
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Bryan Caplan · 286 pages
"Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of American's voting behavior and opinions on a r
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Reveals About Who We Really Are
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Michael Lewis · 362 pages
Examines the history of behavioral economics, discussing the theory of Israeli psychologists who wrote the original studies undoing assumptions about the decision-making process and the influence it has had on evidence-based regulation.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · 499 pages
In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, th
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
Tim Harford · 320 pages
This book outlines a counterintuitive approach to changing the world by assessing its failures, drawing on myriad disciplines to argue that complex challenges must be met through adaptive trial-and-error practices that do not depend on expert opinions or ready-made solutions. The author shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. When faced with comple
The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything
Robert H. Frank · 233 pages
The playful guide to how economics explains the simple but profound ideas that govern our world. Why do the keypads on drive-up cash machines have Braille dots? Why are round-trip fares from Orlando to Kansas City higher than those from Kansas City to Orlando? For decades, Robert Frank has been asking his economics students to pose and answer questions like these as a way of learning how economic
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner · 352 pages
Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion
Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails
Duncan J. Watts · 335 pages
Discusses how the concept of common sense is inadequate in an increasingly complex world and draws on multiple disciplines to offer insight into the sources of such topics as popularity, economics, and self-deception.
The Art of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar · 329 pages