Economic Rational Decision Making, Game theory, Life satisfaction and Links
Post date: Apr 22, 2017 5:08:41 PM
I were in a meeting and now I've got a reason to make sure, I'm making a good rational decisions. That's why I decided to re-listened the talks Thinking Like an Economist. Loved it, pure logic of making money and evaluating deals. Well said, it's all just common sense. Let's see if there's anything new, which wouldn't be obvious with that common sense and logic. Many things sound like stereotypes, because well, those are absolutely true. You can't even argue against those. Spent a weekend reminding my self about basics.
Talks of course had several very good real life examples.
Principles:
- People respond to incentives
- There is no such thing as a free lunch
- No thing is just one thing - There are always (at least) two sides to every interaction
- Law of unanticipated influences
- Law of unintended consequences
- No one is in control
Core concepts:
- Rationality
- Marginal analysis
- Optimization
- Efficiency
Some related links, which I also visited and read as addition to listening the lessons / lectures / course + exams.
- Economics
- Incentives
- No free lunch
- Unintended Consequences
- Pareto Efficiencye
- Prisoner's Dilemma
- Law and economics
- Game Theory
- Strategy
- Nash equilibrium
- Bayesian inference
- Prediction market
- Diminishing returns
- Information asymmetry
- Perfect information
- Probability theory
- Risk management
- Collateralized debt obligation
- Asset-backed security
- Investment
- Investment strategy
- Diversification
- Expected value
- Expected utility
- Information cascade
- Moral hazard
- Rational ignorance
- System risk
- Odds
- Predictive analytics
- Uncertainty
- Business cycle
- Decision making
- Mental accounting
- Real value vs nominal value
- Time value of money
- Theory of value
- Bargaining power
- Opportunity cost
- Bond
- Private equity
- Time preference
- Present value
- Compounding
- Risk analysis
- Rationality
- Competition
- Perfect competition
- Contract price
- Financial risk
- Financial economics
- Statistics
- Risk aversion
- Behavioral economics
- Marginal utility
- Ultimatum game
- Win-win game
- Zero-sum game
- Non-credible threat
- Evolutionary game theory
- Social trap
- Anchoring
- Cognitive bias
- Lucid fallacy
- Pricing
- Endowment effect
- Decision-experience gap
- Illusion of control
- Optimism bias
- Decision theory
- Intrinsic value
- Fundamental analysis
- Loss aversion
- Value
- Theory of value
- Market value
- Sunk cost
- Relevant cost
- Order book
- Status quo
- Due diligence
- Goal
- Irrationality
- Broken window fallacy
- Analysis paralysis
- Default effect
- Economic growth
- Economic efficiency
- Workaround
- Spot price
- Dynamic pricing
- Decision analysis
- Inflation
- Utility
- Utilitarinism
- Rational choice theory
- Happyness economics
- Subjective well-being
- Quality of life
- Eudamonia
- Equanimity
- Vairagya
- Meaningful life
- Self-actualization
- Hierarchy of needs
- Life satisfaction - This is a great last entry
After finishing all that, I'm actually I'm quite happy. These talks contained words and concepts in English, I wasn't fully familiar with. But after all the concepts and models were all very familiar. It's just common sense, like I stated earlier. Considering options and making rational decisions aka sane choices. This is also demonstrate diminishing returns on learning more about economic thinking. If I take a two day course on topic, and won't learn anything new, it's all time & money wasted. Some of these areas are just pure math and logic, but some are ahem bit more complex. Once again, everything is a trade-off.
I also considered to read reading the Finnish books:
- Lamantaittaja
- Välähdyksiä pimeässä ja pimeitä välähdyksiä
- Väärää talouspolitiikkaa
- Mahdoton menestys
- Kaikki oikein
- Erinlainen ote omaan talouteen
- Raha ja Onni
Only funny thing is that when I asked a few friends whom clearly would benefit from thinking like an economist concepts, they all refused to be interested about these concepts. I guess that's what makes the difference.