MKTG4085: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

People do surprising and funny things. Business leaders, policy makers, and scientists long have been interested in why people do what they do, and for a long time that interest has fallen under the rubric of a "rational man" model. It is now clear that the rational model is imperfect, at best. This course takes a look at the less rational side of life, studying the shortcuts, the low road, and the error-prone processes that enable people to feel, decide, and act efficiently--despite costs to rationality. For most of the past 200 years, most of what organizations, politicians, and well-meaning people did in order to make consumers change their behavior consisted of what might be called "shoves"--heavy-handed, choice-restricting, highly-incentivized, information-dense treatments that basically told consumers what to do (or else!). Those, by and large, do not work. Not only do they not work, but they are also costly and can even make the unwanted behavior emerge even more than before the shove by creating boomerang or counterproductive effects. prereq: MKTG 3001

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