Customer Reviews

Advances in Behavioral Economics (Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have frequently assigned this book as the primary text in behavioral economics courses at Harvard and at Duke. It offers an outstanding collection of some of the best professional articles in this field, with particularly good coverage on applied articles.

As the title suggests, it does not include many of the seminal papers in behavioral economics, and in particular readers should also make sure to find Tversky and Kahneman's seminar 1979 paper on prospect theory, published in the journal Econometrica. This article, and many other seminal papers of behavioral economics, are collected in Kahneman and Tversky's edited volume Choices, Values, and Frames. (I also usually assign parts of Colin Camerer's excellent Behavioral Game Theory.) While students of behavioral economics should make a point of reading the 1979 article, I recommend doing so only after reading Camerer's excellent overview of some applications in chapter 5 of Advances in Behavioral Economics; you can also find an excellent presentation of the key concepts if you download the video of Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize lecture from the Nobel website.

This book offers a deep and complete analysis of the so called "Behavioral economics". It covers many of the topics (loss avversion, prospect theory, behavioral finance, ecc. ecc.) of this new science and it never tries to gives a "definitive" answer to all these problems but just to give to the reader new instruments to understand the economic reality. In this way it respects, as it should be done, the character of "working in progress" of this science

However, as the title itself suggest -Andances in Behavioral economics-, in order to read many of the papers it's necessarly to have a kind of economical background (games theory, and so on...)

Advances in behavioral economics is a very smart collection of essays brought together to sum up the recent advances in the recently emerged field of behavioral economics.

The introductory chapter by Camerer and Loewenstein is a must read for anyone interested in the field. And most of the papers selected for this volume are both representative of the field and present the gold standard of research in the field.

Such edited volumes face several difficult choice problems. There has to be a balance between the relative importance of a piece for the field and its age, a similar balance between an essays representativeness of a field of study and its ability to inspire new work. For me, Advances strikes a nice equilibrium of such concerns.

To be sure in the past few years since its publication several new research articles and books on behavioral economics have been published. However, both as a source of reference to the field and a useful guide to the student of behavioral economics this volume is invaluable.