Behavioral Economics
Nudging to Shape Decisions
START DATE
December 3, 2024
FORMAT
Online with live sessions
DURATION
8 weeks, 3–5 hrs/week
LANGUAGES
English, Portuguese, and Spanish
INVESTMENT
$3,200 USD
Limited spots. Register today to ensure your place.
Unlock the value of understanding the human dynamics of choice and
decision-making.
Over eight weeks, you’ll explore the role biases, fallacies, and heuristics play in decision-making. Upon completing the program, you’ll
be equipped with conceptual frameworks and actionable tactics for applying insights from behavioral economics to improve outcomes.
90 %
What percentage of the decisions
people make are based on emotion?
95 %
What percentage of purchasing
decisions are subconscious?
100 %
What percentage of business leaders can
capitalize on their understanding of
behavioral economics?
Whatever your industry, drive better results and create long-lasting value.
Distinctive Online Learning Features
FLEXIBLE METHOD
Our online learning method adapts to your schedule, commitments, and needs. In addition to self-paced content, our programs incorporate knowledge checks, interactive discussion boards, and live sessions to bring content to life.
USER-FRIENDLY PLATFORM
Navigate program content with ease using a simple interface that offers a seamless learning experience.
TAILORED GUIDANCE
Throughout the program, you’ll be accompanied by an expert mentor to answer your questions and provide feedback on your work.
Your Chicago Booth Professor
Devin G. Pope
Steven G. Rothmeier Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics/Robert King Steel Faculty Fellow
Professor Devin Pope is a behavioral economist who researches a variety of topics at the intersection of economics and psychology. He earned his PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2007 and a BA in Economics from Brigham Young University in 2002.
By completing this program, you’ll...
- Learn how to design products and services that create more value for customers.
- Explore hidden biases and heuristics that either reinforce or counteract outcomes.
- Discover the tools to optimize your value proposition for greater influence and impact.
- Discover how “choice architecture” may optimize decisions to benefit economic, regulatory, and policy-creation strategies.
- Gain the frameworks to draw actionable insights from data intelligence to improve customer experience and engagement.
- Discover the emotional and cognitive underpinnings of economic behavior changes and how professionals make decisions.
- Increase management decision outcomes that result in improved enterprise-wide efficiencies and processes.
Upon program completion, you'll also...
Have learned from a world-class faculty within a university associated with 99 Nobel laureates.
Be awarded a certificate of completion and a digital credential of your accomplishment.
Become a member of the global Chicago Booth Executive Education network.
Program Modules
Module 1: A History of Behavioral Economics and Prospect Theory
- Analyze the evolution from classical economics (e.g., Adam Smith) to modern-day neoclassical economics and how behavioral economics started to flourish in this paradigm.
- Understand the revolutionary turning point for the three fathers of behavioral economics at the end of the 1970s to explain how psychology became part of the economic model of decision-making.
- Dissect what systematic bias is and learn about the most cited and groundbreaking behavioral economics theory: prospect theory.
- Explore examples of how prospect theory matters both in our personal lives and when running a business.
Module 2: Sophisticated Choices and Self-Control
- Explain the influence of intertemporal components in the choices we make and realize how they can lead to non-standard behavior (such as obesity, addiction, and credit card overuse and dependence).
- Formulate mathematical models that explain phenomena like procrastination and overindulgence.
- Visualize examples of how self-control problems can lead to poor decision-making—As soon as you turn eighteen you are much more likely to be tried as an adult, and yet we do not see people stop committing crimes as soon as they turn eighteen. Why is this?
- Learn how to apply this knowledge in a way that modifies behavior and improves the health of your business or people around you.
Module 3: Fairness
- Compare the dichotomy between the standard rational economics assumption that humans are self-interested and the behavioral economics propositions explaining how and why humans are altruistic and care about giving to others.
- Articulate why thinking in financial terms and incentives might not always be a wise idea and understand why fairness matters in economic marketplaces and how it is compatible with running a business.
- Analyze why and when it is socially acceptable to charge fees or surcharges and, more generally, to balance supply and demand using standard economic pricing mechanisms.
- Learn the importance of social norms and pressure, reciprocity, and distributive vs. procedural justice
Module 4: The Psychology of Incentives
- Discover through a Qualtrics-based exercise in experimentation and prediction what kind of motivational treatments work best in the short run to make someone execute a given task.
- Realize that behavioral economics is just getting started when it comes to understanding motivation—What other approaches motivate people to make decisions?
- Think about how to create a company culture that is built on solid psychological principles.
Module 5: Biased Beliefs
- Recognize how information interventions over biased beliefs can modify mind-sets and be potential sources of change and development of new standards in decision-making.
- Learn how nearly everyone exhibits common biases such as projection bias and the bias of the winner’s curse.
- Identify some of the most important biases, including survivorship bias and overconfidence, and learn how they influence business decision-making.
Module 6: Inattention (Salience)
- Discover how our attention is limited and why this leads us to make significant decision errors when our attention is drawn to some things but not others.
- See how something as simple as failing to pay attention to certain digits of a number can dramatically change how certain economic markets function.
- Learn how inattention works in a competitive market and how to grapple with the ethics of competing for consumer attention.
Module 7: Discrimination
- Measure and identify the sensitive topic of discrimination through five distinctive methods: audit studies, all-else-equal studies, own-group bias studies, correspondence studies, and eliminating group cues in the decision-making process.
- Learn how standard economics categorizes discrimination into one of two models: statistical discrimination and taste-based discrimination.
- Explore how psychology can deepen our understanding of how discrimination works and how we can combat it.
Module 8: Nudging
- Become familiar with basic principles of good choice architecture and the way we can influence people’s behavior by nudging them into a good direction.
- Discuss several examples of nudging such as putting numbers into context and smart engineering/design.
- Detect examples of nudges and sludge (bad psychology; the exact opposite oulf nudging) in the real world and apply your insight to your business or career.
Faculty-Led Live-Online Sessions
This program features three live-online sessions—a unique opportunity to put theory into practice immediately to amplify your learning and see results. These required sessions not only offer an opportunity to reflect and receive real-time feedback with faculty and peers, but also integrate interactive that can only be taught in a live environment. Participants are expected to attend at least two of the three live sessions to maximize their growth. If a participant is unable to attend a session, an extra asynchronous assignment must be submitted to complete the program.
This program is an excellent fit for:
- Mid- to senior-level executives who seek to grow their organizational competitive advantage.
- Executives in long-established businesses and entrepreneurs leading smaller firms.
- Practitioners across industries, including the manufacturing, retail, and technology sectors.
- Professionals dedicated to business development, new product development, R&D, marketing, and sales.
- Managers who are directly involved with the strategic direction of their organizations.
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