Behavioral Economics

Autumn Semester 2024
Tuesday, 08:15 - 12:00, PER 21, Room C130
ECTS: 4.5
Office Hours: by appointment ( tom.rodriguez@unifr.ch)

Course description Moodle
Description:

This course covers key topics in Behavioral Economics. We start with an overview of common heuristics and biases in human behavior. Next, we explore reference-dependent preferences, such as how a silver medalist in an elimination tournament might feel less satisfied than a bronze medalist because their reference point was winning gold, while the bronze medalist’s goal was simply to make it onto the podium.
We then examine time preferences, illustrated by the tendency of people to buy gym memberships they rarely use, believing they’ll start exercising tomorrow but repeating the same procrastination each day.
The course also covers social preferences, challenging standard economic theories by exploring why people engage in pro-social behaviors, like donating blood, and how these other-regarding preferences can be modeled.
Finally, we discuss motivated beliefs, which is the notion that beliefs can hold intrinsic value similar to goods. An example is the finding that around 80% of drivers believe they are in the top 50%, suggesting that people derive satisfaction from believing they are skilled in certain areas, such as driving.
The course will be split in lectures as well as exercises to rehearse and practice the course content.

Prerequisites:

This course will be relatively formal and requires knowledge of microeconomics at least at the level of microeconomics 1 and 2 at the Bachelor level. Prior attendance of the Master course “advanced microeconomics” is highly recommended.

Required Readings:

The course will be based on selected book chapters and papers

New to MODX?

Pages on a MODX site are called Resources, and are visible on the left-hand side of the manager in the Resources tab. Resources can be nested under other resources, making it easy to create a tree of resources. There are different types of resources for different use cases.

Building your website is done through a combination of Templates, Template Variables, Chunks, Snippets and Plugins. Collectively these are known as Elements, and can also be found in the left-hand side of the manager, in the Elements tab.

Templates contain the outer markup of any page. Each resource can only be assigned to a single template at a time. By adding Template Variables to a template, you can add custom fields for any resource using that particular template.

With Chunks you can share parts of the markup, such as a header, across different templates. Snippets are pieces of PHP that return dynamic content, such as summaries of other resources or the current date. With snippets, you will often use Chunks to mark up the pieces of content it returns, instead of mixing the PHP and HTML.

Finally, Plugins enable more advanced features by hooking into the extensive events system provided by MODX.

To learn more about MODX, be sure to check out the Getting Started section in the official documentation.