Book Tip No. 34 (2019): Expensive is relative. Why we can’t handle money.

Berlin 2018.

Anyone who, like me, once had the opportunity to experience Dan Ariely live in a lecture, will also be able to imagine how vividly Ariely describes our handling of money using personal and everyday examples and observations. The perspective is primarily that of a behavioral economist: Ariely and his co-author Jeff Kaiser are surprised that people do not handle money as rationally and do not evaluate products and services as objectively and soberly as, for example, the (neo-) classical economic theory predicts. You can immerse yourself very nicely in the book by Ariely and Kreisler and wonder with them why we sometimes act so seemingly irrationally. For those who have dealt a little with the basics of human psychology, our behavior is no longer so surprising.

What I would have personally wished for: that the authors in the text very often refer to the original sources and the authors whose empirical studies they describe. Richard Thaler’s “Misbehaving” is a role model. But maybe the Econ-Verlag had target groups in mind who don’t care about that.

25.1.2019

Dr. Hans-Christian Riekhof