|  | Author: Dan Ariely
Publisher: Harper
List Price: $27.99
Buy New: $10.75
as of 11/23/2009 17:44 CST details
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Seller: smokymtnbooks
Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 2015
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Roughcut
Edition: Rev Exp
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0061854549
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.83
EAN: 9780061854545
ASIN: 0061854549
Publication Date: June 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New!!!Great Condition, No Remainder Mark. We Have Over 3,500,000 Books Sold!!!
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 31-35 of 39
 Think out of the box June 29, 2009
Brian J. Baker (FL)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Everyone thinks they're different than everyone else, but are they really? This book sheds light on some of inobvious patterns that we all seem to follow in our daily routines. Some of these patterns are good, most are ridiculous, some are even dangerous, and all can be taken advantage of as opportunities to improve. Thinking out of the box can really make the irritional become quite predictable, and even useful...
Made me think through some things I'd overlooked about market behavior June 27, 2009
Clay E. Hudgins (Southwest and Southeast USA)
29 out of 32 found this review helpful
I have been thinking about economics seriously for nearly 30 years. Classical economics is built to no small degree on the notion that people will generally act in their own best self interest, after rationally and intelligently examining their options. This fit my world view fine in my first career as an engineer (BS and MS in Electrical Engineering).
From my 2nd Career as a Business Development person (MBA), I began to have to deal with people's tendency to not entirely think things through.
Here in this book, we have a professor who runs socioeconomic tests on his MBA students. These students are smart enough, worldly enough, experienced enough, and educated enough to approximate the standard economic assumptions and produce reasonably rational behavior.
Guess what. Even among broad experiments conducted on multiple MBA classes over time, one can predictably pre-bias the outcome of a particular run of a socioeconomic experiment by what seeds you plant in the class members' minds before the experiment. For example, in one experiment in estimating prices, the author requires his students to write the last two digits of their social security numbers on the top of the paper. Simply the act of writing a high number (e.g., 88) versus a low number (e.g., 08) produced statistically significant correlatable influences on the students' later price estimates. Those compelled to write "88" at the top of their papers would reliably estimate higher prices than those compelled to write "08" at the top of their papers, to a statistically significant degree.
Extrapolating to "real life." Watching Fox News will tend to make you more conservative without you knowing it. Watching MSNBC news will tend to make you more liberal without you knowing it.
If you want to understand "real truth," you are just going to have to do a little more than self-select your news feeds. You are going to have to seriously consider a diversity of viewpoints.
Moreover, if you have Social Darwinist beliefs as I once did, you may need to re-think the concept of the Poverty Trap. Early pre-conditioning really does make a difference.
Here is the way I think of it as an Engineer. Classical Economic Theory is analogous to Classical Newtonian Physics. There is nothing badly wrong with it, and it is a good approximation for most real world problems at the middle of the distribution.
However, General Relativity is indeed more correct that Classical Newtonian Physics, and the additional knowledge makes a real difference in certain special cases. And, those special cases are sometimes the really important ones. Likewise, Behavioral Economics is adding something very valuable to our knowledge of Classical Economics.
Read this only if you are brave enough to contemplate that the world might be a little more complex than we wish it were.
Hidden Forces of Decision-Making June 21, 2009
Red Dawn (Glendale, AZ, USA)
Derman's MY LIFE AS A QUANT makes it clear that games & models are inadequate by themselves. Dan Ariely, in PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS, reminds us that traditional economics assumes that we are rational decision-makers. The truth is that we are far less rational than we think & that we make the same types of mistakes over & over. Helpfully, Ariely shares research that will enable us to "develop new strategies, tools, & methods to help us make better decisions." In fact, each chapter in PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL "describes a force that influences our behavior" when making decisions.
Furthermore, if you enjoy gedanken, you will find that PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL is excellent for priming your own thought experiments.
Tremendous Book June 14, 2009
M. Klein (Lynnwood, WA United States)
To be able to make a case that much of our thinking is irrational (not based as much upon facts as we think) would be incredible enough. To do it in such an entertaining manner makes this book well worth the money.
 It looked much more attractive before I've read it June 14, 2009
Gregory Yankelovich (San Francisco, CA USA)
24 out of 36 found this review helpful
Dan is asking very interesting and important questions in this book. He comes with sometimes valuable insights as well. My problem is with methodology of his experiments and trustworthiness of his conclusions. The results variations are often very insignificant and, since size of groups is not disclosed, it is hard to imagine them to be statistically representative. I have expected more.
Showing reviews 31-35 of 39
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