The Top Books in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making

How We Know What Isn’t So

• Title: How We Know What Isn’t So
• Author(s): Thomas Gilovich
• First Published: 1991

Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.

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Thinking: Fast and Slow

• Title:Thinking: Fast and Slow
• Author(s): Daniel Kahneman
• First Published:2011

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.

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• Title:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
• Author(s): Michael Lewis
• First Published: 2016

Lewis shows how Kahneman’s and Tversky’s Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

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The Invisible Gorilla

• Title:The Invisible Gorilla
• Author(s): Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons
• First Published:2010

Why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects.

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Predictably Irrational

• Title:Predictably Irrational
• Author(s): Dan Ariely
• First Published: 2008

From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions.

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• Title:The Righteous Mind
• Author(s): Jonathan Haidt
• First Published: 2012

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens?

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• Title:Moneyball
• Author(s): Michael Lewis
• First Published:2003

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB’s Oakland A’s, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that’s smaller than that of nearly every other team

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• Title:Fooled by Randomness
• Author(s): Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• First Published:2005

An investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.

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• Title:The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Author(s): Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• First Published:2007

Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them.

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• Title:Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Author(s): Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• First Published: 2012

How to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events?

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The Drunkard’s Walk

• Title: The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
• Author(s): Leonard Mlodinow
• First Published: 2008

Why humans seem quite so incapable of rationally predicting outcomes based on the data presented to them.

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• Title:You Are Not So Smart
• Author(s): David McRaney
• First Published: 2011

Each short chapter–covering topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency–is like a psychology course with all the boring parts taken out.

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• Title:Nudge:  Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
• Author(s): Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
• First Published: 2008

By knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.

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• Title:Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
• Author(s): Richard H. Thaler
• First Published:2016

Misbehaving’ is a candid account of Thaler’s struggle getting recognized for his controversial ideas.

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• Title:How We Decide
• Author(s): Jonah Lehrer
• First Published: 2009

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions.

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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

• Title: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
• Author(s): Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
• First Published: 2007

A fascinating explanation of self-deception — how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it.

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The Design of Everyday Things

• Title: The Design of Everyday Things
• Author(s): Donald A. Norman
• First Published: 1988

Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans – from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools – must read this book.

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The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making

• Title: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making
• Author(s): Donald A. Norman
• First Published: 1988

The social aspects of decision making and includes everyday examples from medicine, law, business, education, and nuclear arms control, among other areas

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• Title:Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
• Author(s): Gerd Gigerenzer
• First published:2007

Gut feelings are the result of unconscious mental processes—processes that apply rules of thumb that we’ve derived from our environment and prior experiences. But gut feelings are not things to run away from, they lead to good practical decisions, and underlie the moral choices that make our society function.

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Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

• Title:Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
• Author(s): Gerd Gigerenzer
• First published:2000

Fast and frugal heuristics–simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury.

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• Title:Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions
• Author(s): Gerd Gigerenzer
• First published:2007

Anyone can learn to make better decisions for their health, finances, family, and business without needing to consult an expert or a supercomputer, and Gigerenzer shows us how.

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• Title:How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
• Author(s): Jordan Ellenberg
• First published:2014

Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic.

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The Signal and the Noise

• Title:The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t
• Author(s): Nate Silver
• First published:2012

How can we distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data?

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• Title:The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
• Author(s): Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
• First published:2018

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence.

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• Title:Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
• Author(s): Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner
• First published:2015

As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance.

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• Title:Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making,Problem-Solving,and Prediction
• Author(s): John Brockman (Editor)
• First published:2013

Original ideas by today’s leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who are radically expanding our understanding of human thought.

• Title: Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking
• Author(s): Tim Hurson
• First published:2007

How you can start with an intractable technical problem, an unmet consumer need, or a gaping chasm in your business strategy and, by following a clearly defined, practical thinking process, arrive at a robust, innovative solution.

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Rational Choice in an Uncertain World

• Title:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
• Author(s): Reid Hastie, Robyn M. Dawes
• First published:1988

Renowned authors Hastie and Dawes compare the basic principles of rationality with actual behavior in making decisions.

Thinking and Deciding

• Title:Thinking and Deciding
• Author(s): Jonathan Baron
• First published:1988

How should we think? What, if anything, keeps us from thinking that way? How can we improve our thinking and decision making?

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Algorithms to Live By

• Title:Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
• Author(s): Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
• First published:2016

A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.

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• Title:The Art of Choosing
• Author(s): Sheena Iyengar
• First published:2010

Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests?

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The Paradox of Choice

• Title:The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
• Author(s):Barry Schwartz
• First published:2004

A social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret.

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• Title:How We Decide
• Author(s): Jonah Lehrer
• First published:2009

Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason—and the precise mix depends on the situation.

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• Title:Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
• Author(s): Gary Klein
• First published:1998

Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. It documents human strengths and capabilities that so far have been downplayed or ignored.

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• Title:Rationality: From AI to Zombies
• Author(s): Eliezer Yudkowsky
• First published:2015

Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.

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• Title:A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
• Author(s): Daniel H. Pink
• First published:2004

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.

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• Title:Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
• Author(s): John S. Hammond, Howard Raiffa, Ralph L. Keeney
• First published:1998

Where should I live? Is it time to switch careers? What is the best course of action for me?

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• Title:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
• Author(s): Annie Duke
• First published:2020

Through interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments, this workbook helps you analyze key decisions you’ve made in the past and troubleshoot those you’re making in the future. Whether you’re picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide is the key to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

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• Title: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
• Author(s): Annie Duke
• First published:2020

By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don’t, you’ll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making.

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Stumbling on Happiness

• Title:Stumbling on Happiness
• Author(s): Daniel Todd Gilbert
• First Published: 2006

Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there.

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The Upside of Irrationality

• Title:The Upside of Irrationality
• Author(s): Dan Ariely
• First Published: 2010

Ariely uses data from his own original and entertaining experiments to draw arresting conclusions about how and why we behave the way we do.

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Rationality for Mortals

• Title: Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty
• Author(s): Gerd Gigerenzer
• First Published: 2008

Examines the rationality of individuals not from the perspective of logic or probability, but from the point of view of adaptation to the real world of human behavior and interaction with the environment.

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Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis

• Title: Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
• Author(s): Paul W. Glimcher
• First Published: 2010

Paul Glimcher argues that a meaningful interdisciplinary synthesis of the study of human and animal choice is not only desirable, but also well underway, and so it is time to formally develop a foundational approach for the field.

The Foundations of Behavioral Economic Analysis

• Title: Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
• Author(s): Sanjit Dhami
• First Published: 2017

This is the first definitive introduction to behavioral economics aimed at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.

The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences

• Title: The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences
• Author(s): Herbert Gintis
• First Published:2009

Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences–from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as The Bounds of Reason demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines.

Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited

Title: Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Author(s): Steve Krug First Published: 2000

Required reading for anyone working on Web sites or any kind of user-centered design.

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Title: Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do Author(s): Gary Klein First Published: 2002

Too often, we dismiss these feelings as “hunches” and therefore untrustworthy. But renowned researcher Gary Klein reveals that, in fact, 90 percent of the critical decisions we make is based on our intuition.

Title: Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World Author(s): Gerd Gigerenzer First Published: 2002

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social.

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