Why do we often want things we do not need, and need things we do not want? This paper reviews the very core process of human psyche and the associated biases that make us what we are not: Homo economicus. It also proposes the many ways public policies could be redesigned – based on the recent findings in behavioural economics – in order to change the way people behave in an optimal way so that...

Standard economic theories conceive homo economicus as a rational decision maker capable of maximizing utility. In reality, however, people tend to approximate optimal decision-making strategies through a collection of heuristic routines. Some of these routines are driven by emotional processes, and others are adjusted iteratively through experience. In addition, routines specialized for social...

In this paper, the authors investigate a basic assumption underlying most models based on social or mathematical psychology that consumers are rational in the sense of choosing the most economically efficient brand. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for measuring the efficiency of individual consumer choice, they report the results of two empirical studies, one involving the social psycholo...

7 While many experiments demonstrate that behavior differs from the predictions of traditional economic 8 theory, they have not shown that economic reasoning is necessarily incorrect. Instead, these experiments 9 illustrate that the preferences of homo economicus have been mis-specified. Modeled with social preferences, 10 it may be rational for agents to forego material gains. Social dilemmas ...

During recent years, the addition of game mechanics to non-game services has gained a relatively large amount of attention. Popular discussion connects ‘gamification’ to successful marketing and increased profitability through higher customer engagement, however there is a dearth of empirical studies that confirm such expectations. This paper reports the results of a field experiment, gamifying...

Objective: The debate on human resource accounting is still ongoing, namely in particular the treatment recognition of all expenditures, whether recognized as an expense or asset. As company’s driving force, humans have important role but are financial statements. Therefore, this study aimed to develop alternative model accounting.Design: This was structured build a by synthesizing biological a...

There is much debate as to why economics students display more self-interested behavior than other students: whether homo economicus self-select into or are instead “indoctrinated” by learning, and these effects impact on preferences beliefs about others’ behavior. Using a classroom survey (n > 500) with novel behavioral questions we show that, compared in majors, econ report being: (i) (in par...

The strength of the neoclassical paradigm, generations of students have been told, lies in its hardheaded grounding in a general model of self-interested action. But recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the selfinterested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but utopian world in which conflicts abound but a h...