Behavioral Economics Quotes

• 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.

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  Richard Thaler

  Retirement   People   Important  

  Source: bigthink.com

  5034

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

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  Richard Thaler

  People   Lessons   Economics  

  4976

• 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!

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  Dan Ariely

  Depressing   Confused   Smart  

  802

• 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.

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  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.

  2438

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

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  Cass Sunstein

  Stars   War   Psychology  

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

  3064

• 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.

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  Charlie Munger

  Thinking   Psychology   Mind  

  3259

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

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  Daniel Kahneman

  Loss   Psychology   Aversion  

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

  4737

• 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.

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  Richard Thaler

  Retirement   Self   Saving  

  632

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

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  Dan Ariely

  Decision   Lessons   Environment  

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

  3932

• 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.

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  Edward Boyden

  Decision   Economics   Process  

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  1783

• [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.

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  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.

  576