What happens when you stop assuming people are rational.
11 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Are We in Control of Our Own Decisions?
Dan Ariely (TED) · 2008
Argues human decisions are irrational in ways that are systematic and predictable rather than random, using a run of choice experiments to show the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Libertarian Paternalism
Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein · 2003
Argues that because some default option always has to be set, choosing the one that helps people while leaving every alternative open is a form of…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky · 1979
People evaluate outcomes as gains and losses from a reference point, which breaks expected utility theory in predictable ways.
+7 more at this level
12 works
Dan Ariely (TED)
Argues human decisions are irrational in ways that are systematic and predictable rather than random, using a run of choice experiments to show the pattern repeats across contexts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRichard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein
Argues that because some default option always has to be set, choosing the one that helps people while leaving every alternative open is a form of paternalism that costs nobody their freedom to opt out.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyColin F. Camerer et al.
Replicates eighteen well-known behavioural and experimental economics results and finds roughly two-thirds hold up, showing the field's replication rate but also its limits.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRichard H. Thaler
Traces behavioural economics from an initial list of anomalies that violated standard rational-choice theory to a working alternative that treats predictable mistakes as data rather than noise to be assumed away.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDaniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky
People evaluate outcomes as gains and losses from a reference point, which breaks expected utility theory in predictable ways.
29 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyAmos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman
Shows that describing an identical choice in terms of gains versus losses reliably reverses which option people prefer, undermining the assumption that preferences are independent of how options are worded.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDaniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch & Richard H. Thaler
Shows in market experiments that people demand far more to give up a mug they own than they would pay to acquire the same mug, contradicting the Coase theorem's assumption that initial ownership should not affect the final allocation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyGerd Gigerenzer & Daniel G. Goldstein
Simple heuristics that ignore most available information can match or beat complex models under real uncertainty — a challenge to reading every heuristic as a bias.
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDavid Laibson
Models self-control as a conflict between a present self that discounts the future steeply and future selves that would prefer to save more, explaining why people buy commitment devices to bind their own later choices.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRichard H. Thaler
Argues people file money into separate mental budgets -- rent, fun, savings -- that are supposed to be fungible but in practice are not, which shapes decisions standard economic theory treats as identical.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyErnst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt
Models players as caring not only about their own payoff but about how it compares with others', which explains cooperation and costly punishment that a purely self-interested model cannot.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Colin Camerer et al.
Argues that policies nudging people away from their own well-documented cognitive biases -- a cooling-off period, a default enrolment -- can respect autonomy while still correcting predictable mistakes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyThis subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.