Economic Psychology

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior.

Por que continuamos com dor de cabeça depois de tomar um remédio barato, mas a dor vai embora com uma medicação cara? Por que ostentamos em refeições luxuosas, mas queremos economizar vinte centavos em uma lata de ervilha? Sempre acreditamos que nossas escolhas são inteligentes e racionais, mas Dan Ariely joga por terra essas crenças com revelações surpreendentes que mudam a forma como entendemos o comportamento humano.

Money Anxiety is a behavioral economics book exploring how financial anxiety impacts consumer behavior. The book explains why we make instinctive financial decisions, why we are more risk averse when stressed, and why we hate to lose more than we love to win.

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally.

In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put inequality at the centre of public debate by showing conclusively that less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across everything from education to life expectancy. The Inner Level now explains how inequality affects us individually, how it alters how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequalities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority.

On an average day in America, seven young people aged 19 or under will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning Guardian journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. Far from a dry account of gun policy in the United States or a polemic about the dangers of gun violence, the book is a gripping chronicle of an ordinary but deadly day in American life.

This is a reference academic work dedicated to the critical analysis of consumerism as a historical, economic, and cultural phenomenon. With an interdisciplinary approach and theoretical rigor, the book investigates the deep roots and structural mechanisms that have transformed consumption into a central pillar of contemporary capitalist societies.

Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? In this engaging book, Gloria Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, and more to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject.

Over the last four decades, debt, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels, and the personal savings rate has sunk dangerously low. Why, in the richest nation on Earth, can't Americans hold on to their money? First published in 2008, Stuart Vyse's Going Broke described the epidemic of personal debt that existed in the years leading up to the Great Recession and anticipated the home mortgage crisis that started it. Ten years later, this fully updated new edition tackles the post-recession era of economic recovery.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.

With humanity facing its greatest series of simultaneous crises, Ervin Laszlo offers a scientifically based perspective on what is called for at this critical juncture of our existence: a phase of upshift to higher levels of order and coherence to keep us on our evolutionary path. This book lays out why this upshift is needed, what resources we possess to draw upon, and what the action steps are that will move us all toward this achievable vision of well-being and wholeness.

In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of well-being are critical metrics that predict future life outcomes. In this timely and innovative account, economist Carol Graham argues for the importance of hope—little studied in economics at present—as an independent dimension of well-being.

Why do our friends have more friends than we do? Can simple maths help us with our self-esteem? And how can game theory offer solutions to the climate emergency? When we reason well, it is easier to be happy (and good and also, you know, right). But when dealing with others, it's not enough to be clever - you must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the clever person opposite you and think of what they might do. It's this insight that lies at the heart of Reason to Be Happy, whether you are dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis or letting go of anger.

For all of the energy that the far right has demonstrated - and for all of the support that they receive from institutional conservatives in the GOP and affiliated organizations - the United States is experiencing an upsurge in left-wing social movements unlike any other in the past half-century, with roots not in the Democratic Party but Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Drawing on his original reporting as well as archival research, O’Connor investigates how the capitalist class and the radical right mobilize racism to defend their interests....

What is property, and why does our species have it? In The Property Species, Bart J. Wilson explores how humans acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property and why this might be relevant to understanding how property works in the 21st century. Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom.

Gamer and commentator Jamie Madigan's fresh and pertinent new book shows how business leaders can promote a culture of productivity and innovation using gaming techniques and psychology. Just as games teach players to navigate a virtual "world", bosses teach employees to navigate the workplace by solving problems, cooperating with colleagues, and setting long-term goals. The application of video games has the potential to eliminate dreary offices in favor of more stimulating - and ultimately, more profitable - work environments. Look no further to level up your team!

Why does paying for things often feel like it causes physical pain? Why does it cost you money to act as your own real estate agent? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something now just because we've overpaid for it before? In Small Change, world renowned economist Dan Ariely answers these intriguing questions and many more as he explains how our irrational behaviour often interferes with our best intentions when it comes to managing our finances.

What if you could use Nobel prize-winning science to predict the choices your customers will make? Customer and user behaviors can seem irrational. Shaped by mental shortcuts and psychological biases, their actions often appear random on the surface. In Choice Hacking, we'll learn to predict these irrational behaviors and apply the science of decision-making to create unforgettable customer experiences.

Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture, Michael R. LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling phenomenon Blink, which celebrated impulse thinking over factual knowledge or critical analysis. If best-selling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning is on the decline, leading our society to incompetence and failure.