Behavioral Economics @ Work
Units: 12
Non-profit organizations and businesses are increasingly incorporating insights from behavioral economics and other behavioral sciences into their strategies. This course provides an overview of psychological and economic factors that affect the choices and behavior of individuals within organizations. The course will review empirical research on applications of behavioral insights to a wide range of organizational areas including product pricing, marketing, designing incentives schemes, motivating employees, fundraising, and behavior change. In-class exercises and group projects will supplement the lectures and provide students with hands-on experience in designing solutions to organizations challenges based on behavioral insights. The course emphasizes experimentation as a primary tool for informing organizations decision-making and accurately measuring the effectiveness of behavioral interventions.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Examine the role of behavioral science in organizations
- Gain a broad understanding of how behavioral economics has been applied by organizations to change behavior in a variety of domains.
- Apply insights from behavioral economics to solve organizational challenges
- Improve the quality of your own decisions and use behavioral economics insights to design interventions for changing your own behavior.
- Learn how to design, test and implement insight-driven behavioral interventions for an accurate measure of effectiveness.