Subject notes on behavioural economics
Each year I teach an undergraduate subject in behavioural economics.
I have pulled together the notes for the subject into a website, which you can find here. The notes include the subject content, plus “exercises” that form the basis for the tutorials. If you work through the content, you’re effectively getting the same content as my students, minus the interactive seminars with me, tutorials with the teaching assistants, and the assessments.
I have also developed a set of videos to accompany the notes, which can be found here. The videos are effectively voice versions of the notes (or you can think of the notes as transcripts for the videos), so whether you watch or read, you will get the same content. The videos are largely voiced by me, although the more recent videos tend to have an AI voice, as I discuss here.
I take a traditional approach in these notes, starting with the typical economic approaches to decision making (expected utility theory, exponential discounting, game theory) and then adding the behavioural twists (prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, bounded rationality). Partly, I took this approach because I iterated toward this content over a couple of years from the version of the subject taught by previous lecturers. As a result, I’ve retained much of the past structure (although the content is new). But, there’s also some benefit in building a solid foundation in how behavioural economists traditionally approach the subject before expanding into new territory.
I’m developing a new set of notes that take a more “Jason” approach, applying a critical lens to the research, pulling in interdisciplinary content, and framing humans as good decision makers given our computational constraints. I’ll post those notes when they are ready.
Please feel free to take these notes and use them for your own purposes; the notes are CC-BY. The site is generated using quarto, so you can also clone the repository and make your own version of the notes, or simply take the text files underlying the website.
Finally, I have several other sets of subject notes, including material on financial and corporate decision making. This more applied content is linked here.